The Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs spent last night in the medical wing of Belmarsh high security prison in south-east London. He had appeared at West London Magistrates' Court earlier in the day. Aided by a walking stick, he struggled to confirm his name and address and a doctor wiped spittle from his chin as he dribbled.
He was once a confident, unabashed criminal who posed for photographs with tourists outside his luxurious South American home, but the man who stepped from the private jet at RAF Northolt in north-west London at 8.47 a.m. yesterday was a frail, weak figure.
British police had finally got their man. After more than three decades on the run living off his fame in Rio de Janeiro, Biggs (71) returned to Britain in a jet chartered by the Sun newspaper. An eight-minute court hearing followed his 6,000-mile flight from Rio de Janeiro.
Having long ago spent his share of more than £2 million sterling stolen from a Glasgow-London mail train in the notorious 1963 robbery and suffering from the effects of three strokes, Biggs plainly wanted to return home.
He emerged from the jet wearing a T-shirt covered with the Sun's red logo, but within minutes he was arrested.
He escaped from Wandsworth Prison 15 months into a 30-year sentence for his part in the Great Train Robbery, in which the train-driver was injured and died several years later, and the warrant for his rearrest was continually renewed over the following 36 years.
It had looked increasingly unlikely that British police would ever rearrest Biggs. But it was in an unexpected message to detectives at Scotland Yard last week that he expressed his desire to come home.
Among the many reasons Biggs gave for voluntarily returning was the chance to walk into a pub in Margate, in Essex, to order a pint of bitter and a curry. It could be some time before that happens, as within hours of his arrest he appeared at West London Magistrates' Court charged with being unlawfully at large.
His solicitor, Ms Jane Wearing, confirmed that her client would appeal against serving the rest of his sentence.
Reports have suggested the Sun paid nearly £100,000 to organise Biggs's return to Britain, and the Press Complaints Commission will now investigate whether the newspaper broke the rules governing payments to criminals.