Christmas Island detention centre’s guards were rookies

The guards overseeing the Christmas Island detention centre when Fazel Chegeni escaped had never done it before.

The two guards running the main control room above the Christmas Island detention centre when Fazel Chegeni escaped on Friday had never done it before and did not recognise the perimet­er alarm that sounded as the Iranian asylum-seeker scaled the high fence in the dark.

Mr Chegeni’s escape shortly after 9pm set off a chain of catas­trophic events that has raised difficul­t questions for Serco, the contractor that has already earned $3 billion running Australia’s immigration detention network and will earn up to $1.4bn more by 2019.

For the second time in 4½ years, Serco lost control of the Christmas Island detention centre. This time, an asylum-seeker is dead — Mr Chegeni’s body was found on Sunday, about 32 hours after he slipped away ­undetected.

Island administrator Barry Haase told residents in an email on Monday that Mr Chegeni’s body was discovered at the foot of cliffs.

The unrest that followed caused much more damage than the government first realised.

Detainees commandeered the centre, ripping televisions from walls and lighting fires that melted phones.

Seven inmates, suspected ringleaders, were flown to jail in Perth yesterday.

The Australian can reveal that it was not until two hours after Mr Chegeni escaped, during the 11pm headcount when his compound — called Green — was found to be one man short, that Serco ­realised there may have been an escape.

Even then they thought he might be hiding somewhere inside the detention centre and did not raise the alarm with the Department of Immigration and Border Protection until morning.

Security at the centre has been boosted for its new role detaining serious criminals and the highest-risk asylum-seekers, but there are doubts the electric perimeter fence was turned on at the facility when Mr Chegeni escaped.

His death led to frenzied and wild speculation among detainees about how he died.

Weeks of building tensions reached fever pitch and anguish became vio­lence. A core group of asylum-seekers helped themselves to weapons from a shed, including a chainsaw, and later barricaded themselves in the gym.

Serco staff were evacuated for their own safety and two planes brought in Australian Federal Police with teargas and specialist guards from Serco’s emergency response team.

The standoff, the fires and the damage bring back memories for Christmas Island residents who watched trouble brew in the weeks before the riots of March 2011 when detainees took on police.

Five months before those devastating riots, Serco’s then manager on Christmas Island, Ray Wiley, wrote to his superiors urging­ them to hire more staff to tackle security and safety failures at the overcrowded facility.

This time, the centre is not overcrowded but island residents allege that the dangerous nature of many of the detainees has not been properly taken into account with appropriately trained staff and emergency backup.

Local business owner Russell Payne said there was a failure to provide the resources to control the detention facility properly.

“It happened in 2011 and it is happening now. Totally incompetent,” he wrote on the community Facebook page called CI Blackboard. “Once again the taxpayer will have to fund a partial rebuild of the centre because these idiots can’t provide the resources to cope with situations that arise from, and are caused by, their complete failure to manage (it).”

In the hours after a headcount raised suspicions Mr Chegeni could have disappeared, guards combed the perimeter with instructions to look for blankets or clothing he may have thrown over the fence to insulate himself from the shock but they found nothing.

They were also told to look for human faeces on the fence or the boundary, believing a person who took a big electric shock would lose control of their bowels.

They did not find this either.

For two Serco guards now suspended, last Friday night was their first shift in charge of the detention centre’s main control room above the front gate.

They were overseeing all five compounds inside the centre and the control rooms attached to them, without an experienced control room operator present.

It seems far from ideal but Serco had to make some changes recently after sacking an experienced control room operator, a young local man who erred when he was asked to take detainees to a church service in the main settlement of Christmas Island. When he delivered the group back to the detention centre, it became clear he had left one of them behind.

Christmas Island is now a detention centre for the most unmanageable or unpredictable asylum-seekers. Significantly, it also holds criminals who are citizens of other countries and are being deported under Australia’s tough new character test.

Of the 199 men detained at the centre yesterday morning, only a quarter were asylum-seekers. The other 133 men once held visas to live in Australia but are being sent home over crimes including 27 for assault, 11 for armed robbery, two for manslaughter and five for child sex offences.

Three hours into the novice control room operators’ night shift, one was having a cigarette in an outdoor area on the ground floor. The unfamiliar siren sent him running back upstairs to rejoin his colleague; CCTV footage shows him charging in looking alarmed and a little confused.

Both men had been shown how to respond to alarms that ring when a guard or other official wants access to a restricted area of the high-risk facility. They had each spent parts of two previous shifts watching an experienced control room operator do his work. Neither had heard this alarm before. As the pair talked about what to do next, Mr Chegeni was slipping into the monsoonal rainforest on the rugged, remote northwest corner of the island.

They decided to reset all alarms, and called their supervisor, who apparently came into the control room for a careful discussion about what may have just taken place. Whether or not the supervisor raised the prospect that someone had just climbed the boundary is now a matter for an internal inquiry. That supervisor is suspended too. All three await the outcome of that investigation.

Union of Christmas Island Workers secretary Gordon Thomson said it was not fair the two guards were rostered to do their first full shift in the control room together, before either had done a full shift with an experienced operator. “This is Serco again scapegoating the employees rather than their own problem with mismanagement,” he said.

A Serco spokesman said: “Our staff perform important jobs on a daily basis, often in difficult circumstances. All Serco staff are fully trained for their roles and understand their responsibilities and the requirements of each role.

“In this case we are investi­gating the circumstances that led to the escape and have suspended three staff pending the investi­gation. Christmas Island Immigration Detention Centre is appropriately staffed for the detainees­ at the facility.”