‘Don’t you touch our Biggsy’

Press, 21 April 1977, Page 8

‘Don’t you touch our Biggsy’

NZPA-Reuter London A row is blowing up in Britain about how the escaped great train robber, Ronald Biggs, came to be invited aboard a Royal Navy frigate in Rio de Janeiro and treated to drinks. Members of Parliament will question the Defence Secretary (Mr Fred Mulley) in the House of Commons about this “extraordinary affair”, and urge him to carry out a full investigation into how Biggs came to be aboard H.M.S. Danae. Mr Gwilym Roberts, Labour M.P. for Cannock, said: “I have heard of Government hospitality, but this is just ridiculous. “There is a man who is wanted in Britain to com-

plete a 30-year sentence imposed for one of the biggest, most audacious robberies of all time. And yet here we have the Defence Department apparently plying him with gin and tonic.” Mr Roberts will table a Commons question asking Mr Mulley to make a statement about the affair, and to send circulars to all captains of naval vessels to scrutinise more carefully the civilians they invite on board in foreign ports. Biggs’s social call could have ended in his arrest and return to a British prison to serve out his sentence. But by the time the officer of the watch had been alerted, Biggs was back ashore in his adopted country safe again.

Biggs said yesterday in Prazil that a naval rating had tried to arrest him aboard the Danae, and had been prevented from doing so by other sailors, who shouted: “Don’t you touch our Biggsy”. Biggs, who escaped from Wandsworth Prison 10 years ago, said that he had felt homesick when he saw the “old flag” of the 11-vessel British task force visiting Rio Harbour, had spoken to a group of sailors, and had accepted their invitation aboard.

> After many cans of beer, : one of the sailors had told Biggs that he was under arrest. Biggs said it was not ’ clear whether this had been 1 meant as a joke. He said ! that the other sailors had shouted out: “Don’t you

touch our Biggsy” and “Over our dead bodies” and he had been able to leave the frigate without hindrance.

When he escaped from Wandsworth, Biggs had served less than two years of a 30-year sentence for his part in the £2.6M robbery of a mail train in 1963.

Biggs had arrived on Friday in Rio de Janeiro, as he has done every Friday for three years, to register with the maritime police. Although under a deportation order for entering Brazil with a false passport after fleeing Australia in 1969, Biggs can be deported, by court order, only to a country which will not send him on to Britain, with which Brazil has no extradition treaty.