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An Italian killer serving a life sentence has escaped for at least a third time, a police union said.
Giuseppe Mastini, 60, nicknamed “Johnny the Gypsy”, took advantage of a temporary release from a high-security prison in Sardinia to flee and did not return to his cell on Saturday, the ES Polizia union said.
The police are hunting the prisoner.
Mastini, originally from Bergamo in northern Italy, moved to Rome in the 1970s with his family and committed his first murder at age 11, according to the Italian news agency ANSA.
He first escaped from jail in 1987, when he failed to show up after a temporary release from prison.
He was on the run for two years, during which time he committed robberies, murdered a policeman, wounded another and took a girl hostage.
Caught and imprisoned again, he was given another temporary release in 2014 that was fraught with “irregularities,” the union said, although it was unclear whether he fled on that occasion.
But in June 2017, he again escaped from a prison in northern Italy, following the same method.
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