Biggs sympathy plea

Press, 31 March 1981, Page 8

Biggs sympathy plea

NZPA London The British train robber, Ronald Biggs, now under arrest in Barbados, has pleaded, in an autobiography published in London yesterday, for pardon and said he had been punished enough by years on the run. The book, whose publication was already scheduled when Biggs was kidnapped, was published as British authorities sought Biggs’s extradition from Barbados to be brought back to jail. He escaped in 1965 after serving only 15 months of a 30-year term for his part in a £2.6 million (now worth $6.3 million) robbery in 1963 from a British mail train in which one of the train men was viciously coshed. In his book, Biggs, who is 51, declared he had suffered more than most people do in a lifetime.

“Only someone who has been a fugitive from justice as I have all these years can know the torture of uncertainty and insecurity that this experience brings,” he wrote.

Biggs, who fled first to Australia, was kidnapped two weeks ago by a group of British former soldiers from his refuge in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. He was taken to Barbados and is being held in jail on the West Indian island pending extradition proceedings. When Biggs was first reported. missing from Rio, where he. had lived openly since 1974, there was speculation he staged the disappearance as a publicity stunt to boost sales of his autobiography, entitled “Ronald Biggs, My Own Story.”

"I most certainly have been punished for my crime, and punished in plenty,” wrote Biggs.

He added: “What is the point of putting me back in Wandsworth? To rehabilitate me? I am rehabilitated totally. I am not the same Ronnie Biggs who helped steal all that money in 1963.” Biggs wrote that he missed England — but not enough to give himself up and go back to jail — and his only real

wish in life was for a pardon

“At the moment I am an embarrassment both to the British and Brazilian Governments. Pardoned, I would be an embarrassment to noone and I would be able to lead a normal and constructive life here in Brazil.”

Given a choice, said Biggs, he would settle in Australia, where his former wife, Charmaine, and their two sons live.

Brazilian authorities allowed Biggs to remain, after he had been tracked down there, on the grounds that he fathered a Brazilian son, now aged six by his former mistress in Rio. “Brazil is a colourful country and it suits my temperament,” wrote Biggs. “The life, the music and the people are so outward going, so warm, that they find a response in me.”

But he added: “It is Australia that I miss more than my native country, not only because it- contains Charmaine and my two boys, but because of the affetion I feel for their way of life.”