Greece’s justice minister has sacked three senior officials within hours of the country’s most notorious criminal staging his second spectacular jailbreak in less than three years.

Vassilis Paleokostas, a serial armed robber, was due to stand trial this morning for escaping from Korydallos top-security prison on board a helicopter in 2006. Yesterday, with the guards on high-alert, he did it again.

A helicopter swooped towards the jail yesterday afternoon while a woman with an AK47 dropped a rope ladder into the courtyard. Amid a hail of bullets from the startled guards, Paleokostas and Alket Rizaj, his Albanian accomplice, scrambled up the ladder and they were spirited away from captivity.

As news of the escape spread around Athens, Nikos Dendias, the justice minister, drove directly to the high-security prison and demanded the resignations of the general secretary of the ministry, the inspector-general of prisons and the head of the jail.

Mr Dendias said: “This (escape) was an insult which I will not accept ... I will take measures as harsh as necessary.”

The Prime Minister called an emergency cabinet meeting this morning to discuss the jailbreak as the police embarked on a manhunt of unprecedented scale.

Three prison guards and the helicopter pilot have already been arrested. The pilot was found bound, gagged and hooded in the aircraft, which had landed a few miles away at the side of a motorway north of Athens.

The pilot told police that the helicopter was chartered by a couple who said they wanted to go from the town of Itea in central Greece to Athens. He said they had chartered the helicopter a number of times in the previous weeks but this time threatened him with an automatic weapon and a hand grenade and forced him to take part in the escape plot.

Paleokostas, 43, and Rizaj, 34, had been held in solitary confinement but were allowed to take their daily walk on the prison grounds together, despite their previous escape.

They were to appear in court today in connection with their last jail break on June 4, 2006. That operation had been masterminded by Paleokostas’ elder brother Nikos, himself a convicted criminal who escaped from the same prison in 1990 during a mass breakout.

The elder Paleokostas was recaptured by authorities in September 2006 and is still in jail. He has been convicted of 16 bank robberies.

Rizaj, an Albanian immigrant, was recaptured in September 2006, while Vassilis Paleokostas was apprehended in August 2008.

While on the run, Paleokostas is suspected of masterminding the June 2008 kidnapping of a prominent Greek industrialist, Giorgos Mylonas, who was held for 13 days until his family paid a ransom.

Police are investigating whether Rizaj, during his three-month spell outside prison after his previous escape, was involved in contract killings.

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