The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Final mystery of fugitive
The final part of our series looks at Julian Chisholm’s ultimate disappearing act
By December 1993, the chips were down for northeast drugs smuggler Julian Chisholm. The Aberdeen oil industry diver turned crime boss had seen four of his lieutenants given long stretches in jail after the discovery of a van containing £100 million of cocaine in the Highlands – Scotland’s biggest ever drugs haul.
They had been led by Chisholm, who had orchestrated the entire drug deal from a safe distance at his home in Spain, communicating with the Dimar-b cocainesmuggling freighter using a ship-to-shore radio.
Then in May 1992, Chisholm was arrested on the Costa del Sol after being rugby tackled by a Spanish police officer. He was aged 29 at the time.
Retired customs boss Graham Dick said: “He was in the company of his mum and he was on a false passport.
“He tried to run away. He was stopped by a Spanish policeman. His mum tried to back him up saying he wasn’t Julian Chisholm, but he was arrested.
“We were absolutely delighted. We’d been after him for four years.”
Chisholm was transported from Malaga 100 miles north-east to the infamous Fontcalent Prison in Alicante. The jail comprised of four wings. The fourth wing contained some of the world’s most violent men.
Chet Sandhu, a former steroids importer who is now an author, spent time in Fontcalent.
He said: “My first impressions were terrible. The site I was on had about 40 people on it.
“On the other side of my wing was all the ETA Basque separatist members and the dangerous psychopath killers.
“There was a hierarchy among prisoners. In the dining hall, the corner tables are where the top people sit, because then you can’t get stabbed in the back.”
Despite the daily danger of stabbings, high-profile criminals in the Spanish legal system wanted to go there – for one reason.
Mr Sandhu said: “They knew they had a good chance of escaping. It was an old jail and people could be paid off.”
During his 19-month spell at Fontcalent, Chisholm met a notorious
French gangster named Ahmed Otmane. A man of Algerian descent, Otmane had a fearsome reputation for ruthlessness, commanding a gang in the suburbs of Marseille.
It is documented that Otmane killed policemen and security guards and committed scores of robberies.
Remarkably, he had also escaped from jail seven times – once using a helicopter that had been landed in a Dutch prison yard to flee.
Marc Maouad, a French journalist and expert on Otmane, said: “Chisholm and Otmane both dealt cocaine and had links to South American cartels.
“These two men came together with an intention of trying to escape.
“Otmane had on several occasions before arranged (by payment) to find himself in the same prison cell as people who could be useful to him.”
As 1993 drew to a close, Chisholm was running out of options. He lost his extradition hearing in Madrid and was days away from being extradited to Scotland, where he faced at least 20 years behind bars.
Eugene Costello, who wrote a book called White Gold about the case, said: “He was to be extradited – that should have been that. But instead, a really strange decision was made.”
That decision – to transfer Chisholm 100 miles north to another jail in Valencia – still baffles Scottish authorities.
On face value, it made no sense because Chisholm was due to be flown out of Alicante Airport, right near Fontcalent.
What raised eyebrows was that there was one other name on the prison transfer list – Ahmed Otmane.
On the morning of December 4, two things happened simultaneously.
Firstly, a group of women and children gathered at the entrance to Fontcalent Prison, waiting for visiting
time. Secondly, Chisholm and Otmane were led – in shackles and handcuffs – through the prison reception and through two large security gates, under the watchful eye of armed guards on perimeter watchtowers.
But then there was a hitch. The van that was to collect them was said to be too big to fit in the gates, so the prisoners had to walk outside the jail walls to reach it.
Yards from the van, Chisholm and Otmane used keys they had smuggled into the jail to free their handcuffs and shackles and ran off into the desert.
The Spanish media at the time reported prison bosses claimed guards could not have shot them as the waiting visitors might have been caught in the crossfire.
Mr Sandhu said: “The guards would have been paid off, in my opinion.
“They would have timed it all to coincide with visiting hours.”
So furious with the escape was the Crown Office leader, Lord Advocate Alan Rodger, that he wrote to his Spanish counterpart asking how on Earth it could be allowed to happen.
The Spanish Government ordered a Civil Guard inquiry, but it led nowhere.
Mr Dick said: “The extradition proceedings had gone in our favour. We were going to travel out there to bring him back – and then we were told he’d escaped.
“We were gutted. We didn’t understand it.”
A Europe-wide search for Chisholm began.
Some 48 hours later, a Madrid-based British journalist got a phone call from someone claiming to be Chisholm.
The caller said he was ready to surrender and arranged a meeting point in La Manga 12 hours later. But nobody showed.
Mr Costello said: “It seems that was a clever red herring, to buy Chisholm time to flee in the opposite direction.”
Incredibly, 29 years have passed since the escape and Chisholm is still at large.
The question remains – where is Julian Chisholm today? We know the man he escaped with, Ahmed Otmane, is alive as he contacted Marc Maouad to offer an interview recently.
Mr Sandhu said: “It’s possible Otmane just arranged for Chisholm to escape and got someone to shoot Chisholm in the head and have him taken out. Why take the risk of Chisholm talking to police?”
Others believe it would have been almost impossible for Chisholm to live undetected in Europe.
They point to Africa as a bolthole – particularly because his girlfriend Moina Smaima Bent Laarbi is from Morocco.
Mr Dick said: “The only information we got was that he was maybe in Africa, maybe in Kenya. But we never found him again.”