ESCAPED PRISONERS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 265, 7 October 1940, Page 6

ESCAPED PRISONERS.

SEARCH IN WAITAKERES. Per Press Association. AUCKLAND, *Oct. 6. Three messages received from different parts of the Waitakere district this morning started a day-long energetic. police drive in and around the hundreds of acres of dense bush and scrub to find the four prisoners who escaped from the Auckland prison last Tuesday night, and changed the focus of the search from the Sdverdale-Al-lianv sector, where it had been concentrated since a small Auckland ear was found abandoned there on Friday morning. . . Police cars with radio receivers shuttled to and fro, over roads leading in all directions. This is probably the first occasion in New Zealand when the police had used radio to help them in work of this kind. At stated periods to-day one of the Auckland broadcasting stations sent brief messages of instruction to the patrolling cars equipped with receivers, an innovation which greatly helped .the organising officers to co-ordinate their efforts and save valuable time.

At a late hour it was understood the police were hot on the trail.

THREE MEN ARRESTED

FOURTH STILL AT LARGE

Advice was received by the Inspector of Police in Palmerston Nortli (Mr H. Scott), to-day from the Superintendent of Police at Auckland that three of the four prisoners who escaped from Mt. Eden gaol last week, after attacking three warders, have been located and were rearrested this morning. The men who have l>een found are: Randall Reginald David Smith, labourer, aged 27, who was sentenced to death at Timaru on February 4, 1938, for the murder of an aged storekeeper at Arundel, Canterbury. The death sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life by 7 the Executive Council and was announced by the Minister of Justice (Hon. H. G. R. Mason) on Marcli 8, 1938. John Henry Silva, alias Shortcliffe, aged 25, a labourer and butcher, serving a term of two years for breaking and entering and theft at Christchurch.

Bryan James O’Hehir, aged 23, serving 18 months’ reformative detention on-nine charges of burglary, and recently sentenced at Christchurch to an extra year for escaping from the Christchurch gaol. ( The other escapee who lias not yet been recaptured, David Fraser Watson, aged 21, a seaman and labourer, who was sentenced to reformative detention for 18 months for arson.