A prison inmate in Australia lost a dramatic amount of weight, squeezed through a gap in the wall and escaped, a newspaper reported.

Robert Cole, 35, was serving time for sex offenses and armed robbery in a prison hospital in New South Wales state when officials noticed he was missing early Wednesday, The Sydney Morning Herald reported in its online edition.

Cole, who had recently undergone a dramatic weight loss, slipped his 123-pound body through a gap between the bars on a cell window and a brick wall at which he'd been chipping away, the paper quoted an unidentified Corrective Services spokeswoman as saying.

"Because he's lost a lot of weight, he's a very narrow person, so he squeezed his way through the gap in the brick wall," she was quoted as saying.

Cole avoided the motion detectors and video cameras that monitor the prison grounds at night, then climbed a fence and escaped, the newspaper said. It was not immediately clear how long Cole's sentence was, or how much time he had already served.