SANTA ANA, Calif. — Three inmates who teamed up to pull off an intricate escape from a California jail stuck together and eluded authorities for nearly a week. Then authorities said their alliance began to unravel over a disagreement on whether to kill a cab driver they’d taken hostage.

Six days after their breakout — and 400 miles to the north — fugitives Hossein Nayeri and Bac Duong came to blows in a San Jose motel room because Nayeri wanted to kill the man and bury his body and Duong did not, authorities said Monday. Duong prevailed but the next day left with the hostage, traveled back to Orange County and turned himself in.

The cab driver, who suffered only minor injuries, immediately went to authorities. The following day, Nayeri and the third fugitive, Jonathan Tieu, 20, were arrested in San Francisco after an alert citizen spotted the stolen van near a Whole Foods Market parking lot.

The trio’s rapid undoing after days on the lam was a dramatic end to an escape plan that authorities believe was first hatched by Nayeri six months earlier after he was jailed on charges of torture and kidnapping for allegedly cutting off a man’s penis because he believed he had buried a large sum of money in the desert.

When Duong was booked into the Central Men’s Jail in December on attempted murder charges, he provided an outside contact who helped Nayeri execute his plan, including the smuggling of a knife into the jail, authorities said.

Tieu, who was awaiting trial on a gang-related murder charge, also joined in, authorities said.

“This took a while,” Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens said. “To defeat these security systems, to defeat these metal grates, to defeat these 1-inch bars, it took some time.”