Think Solid Snake's "tactical cardboard box action" is just a gameplay mechanic to sneak past guards? You'd be wrong: A prisoner used a cardboard box to escape from custody in a French prison.

45-year-old Jean-Pierre Treiber, a double murder suspect and one of France's highest-profile prisoners, must have been a fan of Metal Gear Solid, judging by his escape yesterday from a high-security prison. Treiber managed to elude detection by packing himself into a cardboard box he had constructed in the Auxerre, Burgundy prison workshop, reports the Telegraph.

The box was then loaded onto a truck for delivery to France's Yonne region and driven away, much like how Solid Snake could ship himself between different regions of the Outer Heaven fortress in the first Metal Gear game. During the 100-mile journey, Treiber cut himself free and jumped from the truck, an act that was only discovered once the driver had reached his destination and found a hole cut in the tarp used to cover the boxes.

The prison break has caused embarrassment in French officials, who have been unable to explain how a simple cardboard box could fool guards who have been fitted with the latest nanomachines and given genetic therapy that renders them superhuman (with the drawback that they can only see twenty or so feet in front of them). The authorities have begun a manhunt to catch the escaped Treiber, out of fear that his unrestrained presence may cause a public panic due to unnecessarily long and heavy-handed cutscenes.

One might argue that this escape attempt would only hurt Treiber's case, as he has been in prison since 2004 awaiting trial, charged with strangling French actor Roland Giraud's daughter Geraldine, and her friend Katia Lherbier. Though Giraud claims that this escape is proof of Treiber's guilt in the murder of his daughter, supporters of Treiber's innocence point to mysterious DNA traces on the adhesive used to gag Lherbier and Giraud's mouths that does not match his own. Treiber's lawyer says that it proves nothing:

"One can either say he's guilty and that this is proof of his guilt... or one can say he's desperate, that he no longer has faith in the justice system because he's pleaded his innocence for so long and hasn't been heard."

Whether guilty or innocent, The Escapist would like to suggest that if/when the French authorities recapture Trebier, they consider an alternative beyond incarceration and train him as a supersoldier to destroy nuclear-equipped walking battle tanks and to pontificate on the nature of war.

(Via Kotaku)