Already reeling from riots and the spawning of lethal new revolutionary factions, Greece's Government was in deep shock yesterday after the country's most notorious criminal escaped from a maximum security prison for the second time - using the same method as in his last jailbreak.

In an attempt to salvage its shattered credibility, the Government immediately sacked three justice ministry officials and arrested three guards over the escape, in which Vassilis Paleokostas, 44, an armed robber and kidnapper, and his Albanian accomplice Alket Rizai, 34, staged a spectacular exit from jail in a hijacked helicopter. As prison guards shot at them from the ground the pair clung to a rope ladder while an accomplice in the helicopter returned fire.

The main Opposition demanded the Justice Minister's resignation after the two men vanished without trace, emphasising the turmoil and division in which the country has found itself in recent months.

“In any other country ministers would have resigned,” said Dinos Rovlias, a spokesman for Pasok, the Socialist opposition party. “There is no public security, there is no Government in Greece.”

Paleokostas and Rizai made their daring bid for freedom as they were being moved to court for a hearing into an identical helicopter-borne escape in June 2006. They were recaptured after several months at large.

Police sources said that the second break-out on Sunday was almost certainly an inside job. The civilian helicopter pilot was being questioned for taking on passengers without a security check and deviating from the filed flight plan.

Over the past three months Greek society has been in turmoil, a situation exacerbated by the financial crisis. The Athens riots of last December, which caused damage to business and property worth at least €1billion, further demoralised the underpaid and poorly-trained Greek police. As businesses go to the wall and hundreds of people are laid off weekly, violent movements are appearing that blur the traditional line between crime and political extremism. The December riots - which many of the youthful participants saw as a social revolution comparable to that which brought down the military junta in 1974 - spawned a group calling itself Revolutionary Struggle, which machine-gunned a police guard last month.

Last week a suspected splinter group calling itself the Sect of Revolutionaries claimed responsibility for shooting at the car park of Alter TV, a private television station. A day later, a car bomb was discovered in front of a Citibank branch in northern Athens. The stolen car was filled with enough fertiliser-based explosive to have levelled the building if it had exploded, police said.

“December gave a signal to the extremists that the State is weak-willed and no longer has a monopoly on force,” a senior police officer said.

The police were absent early in January when Pericles Panagopoulos, a shipowner, was kidnapped. His wife gathered together the colossal €30 million (£26 million) ransom that was demanded, negotiating with the kidnappers personally, until the tycoon was freed a week later.

The prison escape may be linked to the abduction; police speculated that some of the money from the kidnapping could have gone into the helicopter operation.

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