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Two prisoners escaped from a French jail using bed sheets after sawing through the bars of their cell, a prosecutor said Thursday.France has some of the worst prison overcrowding in Europe, and staff unions have complained the state is neglecting normal jails as it moves narco criminals into new supermax prisons.Guards noticed that the two men had escaped from the jail in the eastern city of Dijon shortly before dawn, the prisons authority said.The pair "seem to have sawn through bars" and "fled using bed sheets", Dijon prosecutor Olivier Caracotch said, without providing further details on how exactly they used the bedding.The fugitives are a 19-year-old man held in pre-trial detention since October 2024 for attempted murder, and a 32-year-old man incarcerated since 2023 over threats and violence against a partner, Caracotch said.Union official Ahmed Saih, who represents prison officers at the jail, said the inmates used "old-fashioned, manual saw blades"."We've been warning about the risk of a jail break for months," Saih said, noting earlier reports of saw blades found inside the prison.He called for more staff and better equipment, including "gratings that cannot be sawn through".Dijon prison, built in 1853, is in poor condition, with 311 inmates for 180 places, according to the justice ministry."Prison is very hard here," an inmate released Thursday after eight months, told AFP."There were three of us in a cell: two on bunk beds and one sleeping on the floor," he said outside the prison gates.The prison break comes less than two weeks after another escape in the northwestern city of Rennes.A 37-year-old convict, who had more than a year still to serve for theft, fled on November 14 during an outing with fellow prisoners to the city's planetarium.He was arrested Thursday in a traveller community camp in the nearby city of Nantes, sources close to the case told AFP, requesting to remain unnamed as unauthorised to speak to the media.Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin sacked the prison's director.Three prison directors' unions on Wednesday lashed out at the tough-talking right-wing minister, who is pushing through a plan to lock up the most dangerous drug traffickers in supermax prisons.They accused him of "devoting all the resources of a debt-ridden state" to the high-security prisons for those accused of drug trafficking and jihadist attacks, and neglecting the "vast majority" of other jails."While the justice minister parades around in overfunded facilities, other (prison) services are suffering," they said in a joint statement.Darmanin last week announced the Dijon facility was scheduled to receive €6.3mn ($7.3mn), as part of a programme to eliminate mobile phones from six French prisons.France has some of the worst prison overcrowding in Europe, ranking third worst after Slovenia and Cyprus, according to a Council of Europe report published in July.In early October, the national average was 135 inmates per 100 places available.In comparison, the rate in Dijon is almost 173 inmates for 100 beds.Notorious French drug baron Mohamed Amra, known as "The Fly", was transferred to a new supermax prison in northern France in July.Amra made international headlines when he escaped in May 2024 when the prison van he was being transported in was ambushed by gunmen and two prison guards were killed.He was caught in Romania and extradited to France after a months-long manhunt. 

A teenage Russian street musician who has spent nearly a month in jail after singing anti-Kremlin songs was handed more jail time on Tuesday in a case rights activists say shows how stifling wartime censorship has become.Diana Loginova, 18, who sings in a group called Stoptime, was arrested in her native St. Petersburg last month after giving a series of impromptu street concerts in the heart of Russia's second city in which she belted out cover versions of songs penned by Kremlin critics with sometimes subtle anti-war and, in one case, anti-Putin lyrics.Loginova, whose performances prompted young passers-by to sing along and saw the band swiftly build a social media audience of over 50,000 followers, has already been jailed twice after video of the concerts went viral online and attracted the attention of the authorities.A court in St Petersburg ruled Tuesday she should spend a further 13 days in jail on a new public order offence. Alexander Orlov, the band's guitarist and her fiance, was also handed another 13 days in jail by the same court.Authorities in Russia have cracked down hard on critical voices since Moscow sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022. They argue that society must be as united as possible, at a time when they say it is locked in a proxy war with the West.Singers who are critical of the authorities have fled the country and are cast as traitors by pro-Kremlin politicians and have often been designated as "foreign agents" — a label which has negative Soviet-era connotations related to foreign espionage.Loginova, a music student who performs under the stage name Naoko, was initially jailed for 13 days for a public order offence after her performance of a banned track, the "Swan Lake Cooperative", by exiled anti-Kremlin Russian rapper Noize MC, went viral on social media.The Swan Lake track caught the authorities' eye because the famous ballet by Piotr Tchaikovsky is seen as a symbol of political change by some in Russia: it was shown on state TV after the death of Soviet leaders and during a 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president.Loginova's performance of another track disliked by the authorities — *You Are a Soldier by singer Monetochka, who like Noize MC has left the country and is designated a "foreign agent" — got her into further trouble and saw her fined 30,000 roubles ($369) for discrediting the army and she was separately handed another 13-day jail sentence for "petty hooliganism"Tuesday, she was handed another 13 days, her third consecutive sentence.Amnesty International says Loginova and her band mates have been subjected to "carousel arrests", a practice the rights group said is used to prolong deprivation of liberty without filing criminal charges by rearresting them immediately when one period of so-called administrative detention ends."Their only 'crime' is singing songs that challenge the suffocating official narrative," said Denis Krivosheev, Amnesty International’s deputy director for Eastern Europe.Court records show that Loginova faces more charges for discrediting the army, which could see her hit with another fine at a later date.Irina, her mother, told reporters Tuesday after the court ruling that she thought her daughter and her bandmates had done nothing wrong and did not know why their concerts had attracted so much attention from the authorities and from the media.

A Chinese woman who masterminded a multi-billion-dollar bitcoin scam and evaded authorities for years was sentenced to 11 years and eight months in jail by a UK court Tuesday.The 47-year-old Zhimin Qian was accused of orchestrating a Ponzi scheme that defrauded around 128,000 people in China between 2014 and 2017.It raised billions of dollars, much of which was converted to bitcoin.After she came to the UK and during a multiyear investigation where she evaded capture, British police seized 61,000 bitcoin worth more than £5bn ($6.6bn), believed to be a record in crytocurrency-related crime.She was arrested in the northern English city of York in 2024.Qian, who pleaded guilty to acquiring and possessing criminal property in September, received the sentence at London's Southwark Crown Court.A Malaysian accomplice, Seng Hok Ling, also 47, was jailed at the same court for four years and 11 months after he pleaded guilty to one count of transferring criminal property."It has been one of the largest money-laundering cases in UK history by value and the largest confirmed seizure of criminal assets in Europe," a spokesperson for London's police said at a briefing."In terms of what will happen with the bitcoin seized, the Crown Prosecution Services are leading a separate civil recovery process," the spokesperson added.Following scrutiny from Chinese authorities, Qian - also known as Yadi Zhang - fled her home country in 2017 and came to Britain. The court heard that she evaded UK authorities for around six years.She travelled across Europe, staying in upscale hotels and buying jewellery including two watches worth nearly £120,000 ($160,000), the court heard.With the help of an accomplice, Jian Wen, she rented a lavish London property for around £17,000 a month and claimed to run a successful jewellery business.Qian first drew the attention of British authorities in 2018 when she attempted to buy a London property and suspicions were raised over her bitcoin.Officers raided the rented London home, where they found laptops containing a bitcoin fortune, but did not immediately grasp the scale of the fraud.But police surveillance of Qian's co-defendant Ling led to her arrest in April 2024.Wen was jailed last year for six years and eight months over her role in the scheme.Qian's defence counsel said their client did not intend this to be "a fraudulent scheme from the outset" and "always believed that significant profits could be made from bitcoin".On Monday, after her lawyer made a statement about her good behaviour in prison and noted her isolation due to difficulties speaking English, Qian shed a few tears.Fuelled by growing interest, bitcoin, which was trading at around $3,600 at the end of 2018, is currently hovering around $100,000.Details of a compensation scheme for victims proposed by British authorities are still being thrashed out in London's High Court in civil proceedings, where more than 1,300 alleged victims have come forward, according to sources close to the case.A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said Chinese and British law enforcement agencies were "cooperating on cross-border fugitive and asset recovery" in the case.