Escaped Prisoner Still At Large

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32118, 14 October 1969, Page 1

Escaped Prisoner Still At Large

(New Zealand Press Association)

AUCKLAND, October 13.

Police are still looking late tonight for a prisoner who escaped from Mount Eden prison on Sunday night or this morning.

Monty Tokowha Hona Kapua, aged 23, disappeared from prison between 9 p.m. on Sunday and 6.32 a.m. today. Prison officers rousing prisoners for breakfast found Kapua missing when they checked his cell Detectives are investigating the possibility that an accomplice was waiting outside the prison with a vehicle. The police are making inquiries in the Turangi area where Kapua, who was serving a two-year sentence for burglary and ear conversion charges, used to live. Officers found that Kapua had unscrewed a metal grille

in the front of the window of his cell with a screwdriver, then used a hacksaw blade to saw through a one-inch steel bar.

He then slid down the 25foot wall outside his cell on a makeshift rope made of blanket strips. Kapua crossed the exercise yard, climbed on to the roof of another building and then on to the 25-foot wall surrounding the prison on the southern side. An eight-foot pole with a hook on one end was found lying on the top of the prison wall Police think this could have been used in the escape. It came from a prison workshop.