The British newspaper “The Guardian” published on Sunday the full story of the engineer who helped the Jewish militants to storm Acre prison in Palestine in 1947.

The family of a British civil servant who built a notorious jail for the empire in Palestine has revealed he leaked the building plans to Jewish militants, helping them to launch a legendary prison break in 1947.

Etkes, a Russian Jew and American citizen, was a prominent engineer working for the British forces. While helping the empire to establish Palestine as a strategic center in the eastern Mediterranean, the ardent Zionist’s true motivation was to develop what he believed would be the future state of Israel.

To add, he was the main reason for the storming of the prison, which had been built on a 12th-century crusader fortress, that occurred late on May 4, 1947.

Etkes said he had also used his British connections in 1921 to transfer weapons from the British-run Jaffa armory, which he then “lent” to Jewish forces in Tel Aviv during the acts of Palestinian resistance.

Moreover, he saw no contradiction by working for both sides, adding that the British empire and the Zionist movement were kinds of walking in the same direction with different goals.

While British forces found out he had transferred the rifles, the incident was either forgotten or disregarded.

Two decades later, he received the King’s Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom for building a deep water port in the city of Haifa and for constructing a vast network of roads.

The newspaper said, “Jewish terrorists” seized adjacent Turkish baths, one of the few sides of the prison, to break into it, and they succeeded in blowing a hole in the wall.

At the same time, militants threw a grenade into a separate part of the prison as a diversion and at least one of the attackers was disguised as a British Royal Engineer. “Jews and Arabs rushed out together,” wrote the paper, estimating that about 250 prisoners fled the jail.

Menachem Begin, who led the Zionist Irgun paramilitary that claimed responsibility for the prison break, described it as the most important attack to have a “disintegrating effect on the British government’s prestige”. Begin later became Israel’s prime minister.