In July 2015, Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman escaped the Altiplano prison through a tunnel under his cell's shower - the second time in 14 years that he managed to flee a maximum-security prison. Guards discovered a deep hole with a ladder that led to a tunnel that in turn led to a building on a hill surrounded by pastures.

Not as clever as Guzman: In 2011, the wife of inmate Juan Ramirez Tijerina visited her husband in a Mexican prison, where he was serving a sentence for illegal weapons possession. She brought along a large suitcase she planned to lug him out with again. Prison guards, however, found the young man inside - curled up inside in the fetal position.

In 1983, 38 Irish Republican Army (IRA) inmates broke out of The Maze, considered to be one of Europe's most escape-proof prisons. The Maze was the main prison in Northern Ireland for sentenced republican and loyalist paramilitaries. The inmates used smuggled guns and knives to overpower staff, and hijacked a kitchen van to drive to the main gate, and out of the compound.

With the help of sharpened spoons and an improvised drill, three bank robbers managed to burrow their way out of their cells in Alcatraz high security prison in the San Francisco Bay in 1962. To fool the prison guards at bay, the trio placed dummy heads in their beds. Once they were out, they used an inflatable raft made out of raincoats - and vanished.

It sounds like a script for Hollywood blockbuster: Pascal Payet twice used helicopters for his dramatic prison breaks. In 2001, the convicted murderer fled from a prison in a French village using a hijacked helicopter. In 2007, he again used a helicopter for a get-away. Previously, he had helped organize the escape of three captives who had been in jail with him - again using a helicopter.

Awaiting trial, serial killer Theodore Robert Bundy escaped from a county law library by jumping from a window. Re-arrested and sent to jail in Colorado, Bundy lost 30 pounds so he could escape again through a small light fixture hole in the cell ceiling. Bundy spread terror across the US, killing numerous women between January 1974 and 1978, when he was finally recaptured and sentenced to death.

Inmate Walter Stürm, imprisoned for stealing offenses, left a smug note in his cell after his get-away from a Swiss prison in 1981. "Off hunting Easter eggs," the note read. Stürm had sawed through the bars on his window, let himself down to the ground to the prison yard and fled to freedom by using a ladder. It was his third prison break.

In June 2015, two convicted murderers, David Sweat and Richard Matt, broke out of a maximum-security prison in upstate New York, cutting holes in the walls of their adjoining cells, and working their way through a maze of catwalks and pipes to emerge from a manhole. The duo did a practice run the night before the escape. Matt was later killed by police, while Sweat was recaptured, badly injured.