PRISON BREAK IN SYDNEY

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25389, 12 January 1948, Page 3

PRISON BREAK IN SYDNEY

FORMER SOLDIER ESCAPES EXPERIENCES DURING WAR (From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, January 6. Using the technique he learned as a soldier escaping from a German prison train in Jugoslavia and from the Turks, Crofton Edward Barnes, aged 26, has evaded Sydney police since last Thursday, when he escaped from Long Bay Prison. Barnes was serving a six months’ sentence for housebreaking. He slipped from a line of prisoners being marched t© a picture show and scaled a 20ft .wall. He served with a field regiment in the Middle East, and when, in 1941, his unit was retreating from the Germans in northern Greece, he and an officer manned two Bren guns at a river crossing, while the rest of the battery took the guns across. Barnes was captured. Put on a prison train to be sent to Germany, Barnes escaped in Jugoslavia, and made his way into Turkey, where he was interned. There he joined up with several other Australians who had escaped from Greece, and engineered a second escape. The men acquired a boat, and after an adventurous trip across 200. miles of sea, landed in Syria, which was then occupied by Allied troops. From Syria. Barnes went to Ceylon, then New Guinea, where has was invalided to Australia and discharged. Barnes has been restless since his discharge, and has shown a craving for excitement and adventure. His latest escapade has distressed his respectable elderly parents who, through a newspaper, appealed to him to give himself up to the police. Mr Barnes, senior, said that he was lying on a bed on the front veranda of his home reading a book when detectives, some with guns drawn, arrived. “They asked me where my son was. I nearly collapsed,” said Mr Barnes. “It is unbearable to think of your son being hunted.”