MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Train Robber Ronnie Biggs back in Britain. Under arrest, in court, and appealing for release.

Ronald Biggs, the Great Train Robber, who spent many years in Brazil as a fugitive from British justice, is back behind bars in an English jail. Mercopress Correspondent Harold Briley, formerly based in Brazil as a foreign correspondent, knew Ronnie Biggs in Rio de Janeiro.

Ronnie Biggs' prison environment is a stark contrast to what for many years was his lavish life style in sunny Brazil. Though he now pleads poverty and came back to the United Kingdom for medical treatment he says he can no longer afford in Brazil, he lived in a luxury flat in Rio de Janeiro when I knew him there.

I first met him in a hardware store in downtown Rio, in crime-ridden streets, near the harbour and the BBC office. He ruefully told me he was buying new locks and bolts to protect his home from Brazil's burglars as he had been robbed! How ironic that such a notorious criminal should himself be the victim of crime!

He was a member of the gang, who in 1963 robbed a mail train and got away with one of the biggest hauls in British criminal history, stealing 2.6 million pounds in bank notes. They had stopped the night train with makeshift lights at a lonely country rail crossing. One of the gang coshed the train driver, Jack Mills, over the head so severely that he died within a few years. All the train robbers were caught and jailed for up to 30 years, including Ronnie Biggs.

After serving only fifteen months, he escaped from London's Wandsworth prison 35 years ago, fleeing first to Australia to be re-united with his wife, then to Rio de Janeiro, where Brazilian law prevented his extradition to Britain because he had a Brazilian child by a Brazilian woman.

While I was in Brazil, he was mysteriously kidnapped, drugged and flown to a British Caribbean Island where a botched attempt to have him extradited to Britain failed on a legal technicality. Had it succeeded he would by now have served a reduced jail sentence and be free.

He invited me to his flat where he was promoting his then recently published biography which I still have on my bookshelf. He lived for many years on publicity from his status as a celebrity criminal. He charged visiting journalists for stories about his life-style as he entertained them beside his swimming pool. He also appeared in television advertisements for a brand of coffee which he promoted as a bargain, winking at viewers and declaring : "It's a steal!".

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