Alexander Delgado, Who Swapped Places With Twin Brother To Escape Prison, Recaptured

A prisoner in Peru, who drugged his twin brother, and escaped from jail, leaving the latter in his place, was recaptured Monday.

Alexander Delgado, 28, was serving time for child sexual abuse and robbery in a prison north of Lima, Peru, when his twin brother, Giancarlo, came to visit him on Jan. 10, 2017. It is then that Alexander drugged his brother, swapped his clothes for his, took his ID, and walked out of the jail. Prison officials realized that Alexander had escaped from the facility when Giancarlo’s fingerprint analysis revealed who he really was, BBC reported.

A former justice minister, Marisol Pérez Tello, said the wickedness of Alexander’s escape plan had left many shocked.

“It’s unbelievable — in 12 years nobody had escaped from Ancón I,” Tello said.

In the initial confusion as to what had transpired, the police suspected that Giancarlo had aided his twin brother in his escape plan. However, when it was proven that Giancarlo himself was duped by his brother, all charges against him were dropped.

Thirteen months went by and there was no sign of Alexander anywhere. When the police failed to locate him, the Ministry of the Interior offered a reward of 20,000 Peruvian Sol ($6106) for information that could lead to his capture.

On Monday, the police located Alexander in the front of a building in the seaside district of Callao, Peru. When National Police of Peru agents closed in on him, he tried to escape, but was caught before he could disappear again. It is not clear if the police was tipped off by someone about Alexander’s whereabouts or they tracked him on their own.

“Today there was the recapture of a violator who on 10 January 2017 fled Piedras Gordas when he was supplanted by his brother,” the interior ministry said in a statement, the Guardian reported.

“This relative was in detention in place of him, but today Delgado Herrera has been arrested,” it added.

After being recaptured, Alexander, who also went by the alias Vaporito, said he escaped from prison because he was “desperate” to see his mother.

Alexander was convicted of sexual violation of a minor in 2015 and was serving a 16-year sentence. According to reports, he will most likely be shifted to a maximum security prison in Challapalca, located at 5,000 meters above sea level in Peru's highlands.

In a report by Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Challapalca was deemed “unfit” for detaining prisoners and Peruvian State was requested that “the personnel detained at those prisons be transferred to other prisons.”

The report further stated that prisons like Challapalca “are in totally inhospitable places, both cold and geographically isolated. This makes it very difficult, in practice, for relatives to visit, because of the distance and other related obstacles. In addition, the conditions of detention of many detainees are excessively severe, as they are practically not allowed to spend time in the yard nor to do physical exercise.”