Escape from Manus

Here’s a radio documentary about Jaivet Ealom’s thrilling 2017 escape from Manus Regional Processing Centre.

Just as Jaivet is about to board his airplane to freedom, the passenger in front of him turns around. It’s a nurse from the base:

The nurse would have known him as EML19 because you didn’t have names where he’d been living. Manus Regional Processing Centre [was] an immigration processing facility inside a military base on an island in Papua New Guinea, patrolled by the Australian Federal Police and the ships of the Australian Navy. … No one detained there had ever escaped.

Eep!

No spoilers.

The escape, he says, was inspired by Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and an “encyclopaedic knowledge” of TV’s Prison Break.

I enjoyed the detail that his smuggled cellphone hides behind a poster, not of Rita Hayworth, but of a biryani.

His story (of multiple escapes, it turns out) is further documented in his book, Escape From Manus.

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