Man who escaped in parcel is caught

A French murder suspect who caused a media sensation after escaping from prison in a cardboard box and evading a huge manhunt during weeks on the run, has been recaptured, the interior ministry said on yesterday.

Jean-Pierre Treiber, suspected of the murder of two women in 2004, slipped out of prison on 8 September by shutting himself into a box that he had made in a prison workshop.

The box was loaded on to a delivery van that took him away from prison. He eluded police for more than two months, writing to the media to proclaim his innocence and sending accounts of his days in a woodland hideout to a woman friend. He was arrested yesterday in Melun, near Paris, along with three others suspected of helping him in his flight. Treiber's case was followed with keen interest in the French press, which published grainy surveillance photographs of the fugitive walking untroubled in the streets of a small town near Paris as well as extracts of the letters to his friend.