Details of how the most feared drug lord escaped maximum security prison for the second time

Mexico: Narcotics kingpin Joaquin Guzman, nicknamed El Chapo or Shorty, got out through an elaborate mile-long tunnel under Altiplano prison on Saturday night.

The $1billion kingpin broke free from the high security jail on Saturday night - and a new video shows the mouth of the tunnel, as well as the abandoned building where the passage ends.

What look like meagre living quarters can be seen - complete with a bare mattress, a fridge and a pair of the trainers lying by the bed.

It is thought the infamous drug boss's liberators stayed there while the dug the tunnel.

Mexico's attorney General Arely Gomez was filmed touring the site on Sunday

"We already have evidence here that they left yesterday at midnight. The investigation to integrate the fingerprints, anything that could be found, the investigators are evaluating them," said Gomez after her house tour.

Guzman, who had bribed his way out of prison during an escape in 2001, was seen on video entering his shower area at 8:52 p.m. on Saturday, then disappeared, the National Security Commission (CNS) said.

Wanted by US prosecutors and once featured in the Forbes list of billionaires, Guzman was gone by the time guards entered his cell in Altiplano prison in central Mexico, the CNS said.

Beneath a 20 inch by 20 inch hole in the cell's shower area, guards found a ladder descending some 32 feet into the tunnel, which was about 5.6 feet high and 30 inches wide.

Prison workers were quickly detained over the escape.

Prosecutors are questioning 30 prison employees amid suspicions of an inside job.

Guzman was one of the world's top crime bosses, running the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, which has smuggled billions of dollars worth of cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamines into the United States and fought vicious turf wars with other Mexican gangs.

The flight of Guzman, who became a legendary figure in villages scattered in the sierra where he grew up in northwestern Mexico, seriously undermines Pena Nieto's pledge to bring order to a country racked by years of gang violence.

US Attorney General Loretta Lynch, noting Guzman faces multiple drug-running and organized crime charges in the United States, said Washington shared Mexico's concern over the escape.

 

The breakout happened in the State of Mexico, the home state of Pena Nieto, who took office in 2012 vowing to confront cartel violence that has killed more than 100,000 people since 2007.

The Mexican president has come under increasing pressure to deliver on his pledges to root out corruption after becoming embroiled in a string of conflict-of-interest scandals.

He was en route to France when news of Guzman's getaway broke.

Before Pena Nieto won election, politicians in his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had mocked their conservative rivals for letting Guzman escape while they ran the country, saying it would not have happened on their watch.

Days after Guzman was captured in 2014, Pena Nieto said another El Chapo escape must "never happen again."

"Given what happened in the past, truly, it would be worse than deplorable, it would unforgivable," he said then.

Over the past decade, dozens of illegal tunnels built by gangs trafficking drugs and people across the US-Mexican border have cropped up, with well over 100 found since 2007.

But penetrating Mexico's highest security prison to spring the world's most infamous drug smuggler undoubtedly represents a more audacious challenge, experts said.

In 2001, Guzman paid guards to help him slip out of the high-security Puente Grande prison near the city of Guadalajara after a previous arrest in 1993.

After eluding capture for 13 years, Guzman was arrested in February 2014 in his home state of Sinaloa.

Government officials vowed on Sunday that Guzman would be recaptured, and security forces fanned out to search roads near the prison, which is some 60 miles west of the capital.