Pascal Payet (born 7 July 1963) is a French criminal who has gained notoriety for his daring prison escapes using hijacked helicopters. He was initially sentenced to a 30-year jail term for a murder committed during the robbery of a security van in 1997. Criminal career and escape attempts Born in Montpellier, France, Payet spent his childhood in Lyon before settling in Marseille. In 1988, he was convicted of aggravated assault and again in 1993 for conspiracy. On November 20, 1997, he participated in an attack on a Banque de France armored car in Salon-de-Provence during which a guard was killed. He was arrested along with Éric Alboreo in Paris in January 1999. On October 12, 2001, he escaped from a prison in the village of Luynes in the French department of Bouches-du-Rhône on board a hijacked helicopter with Frédéric Impocco. On October 18, Impocco was captured and brought in for questioning in Paris. On April 14, 2003, Payet organized another helicopter escape from the Luynes prison, this time of Franck Perletto, Michel Valero, and Éric Alboreo, who had been arrested with him in 1999. They were caught three weeks later. In January 2005, Payet was sentenced to 30 years in prison for murder in connection with the 1997 armored car hijacking in Salon-de-Provence. This sentence was upheld in May 2006 following an appeal by the cour d'assises of Var. In December 2005, he published an open letter on his blog entitled "The Saga of My Transfers" (French: "L'épopée de mes transferts") in which he criticized the conditions of his imprisonment. Before writing the letter he had gone on a hunger strike at a prison in Metz in protest against having been transferred nine times in 30 months. In January 2007, he confessed to organizing the 2003 escape and was sentenced to an additional seven years in prison, while his co-conspirators were each sentenced to three. He was also sentenced to another six years for his own escape in 2001. By July 2007, Payet was one of the most closely surveilled prisoners in France and was never kept at the same prison for more than six months. He had been officially classified as a "détenu particulièrement surveillé," or a prisoner under especially high surveillance, and placed in solitary confinement. Despite these measures, on July 14, 2007, taking advantage of Bastille Day celebrations, four masked men hijacked a helicopter from Cannes