A huge manhunt was launched after prisoner William 'Billy' Smith was wrongfully released from HMP Wandsworth
13:46, 06 Nov 2025
For a manhunt which gripped the nation - and dominated Parliament - it ended in a bizarrely humdrum fashion.
As I saw first hand, there was absolutely no sense of drama or urgency when William 'Billy' Smith handed himself in at HMP Wandsworth this morning, three days after being wrongly released. As if to underline the mood, two police officers, who were sitting in a marked car outside the jail, were none the wiser that the hunt for Smith was over until Mirror photographer Jeremy Selwyn told them they had just missed him walking in.
Smith made no fuss as he stepped out of a flat-bed truck and gave a sobbing woman a kiss before walking into the prison's public reception area just after 10.30am.
Rather than one of Britain's most wanted, he looked more like an ordinary visitor popping in to see a banged up relative. Seconds earlier, he was heard saying: “I’m the prisoner they’re looking for. I’m about to hand myself in.”
The remark was pretty far removed from the drama of Prime Minister's Questions barely 24 hours earlier, when Keir Starmer's stand-in David Lammy found himself on the ropes over prison release errors.
Despite his status, Smith was allowed to walk freely in and out the prison's doors and was even given the privilege of enjoying a cigarette, which he lit up after being handed a lighter by a laughing female guard.
The fraudster, who was wearing a blue Nike tracksuit, then became involved in what appeared to be a heated conversation with a male guard, who stood alongside him and another warder while he finished smoking.
It appeared Smith, who at one point could be seen breaking into a smile, was arguing to be let inside, while the guards were telling him he had to wait.
Smith was eventually led back inside before a woman inside was heard calling out to a colleague: "One of the prisoners who was wrongly released has just come back in". And with that, one of our most sought inmates was finally led back behind bars.
The scene was almost laughable, but at the time of writing, it must not be forgotten the hunt continues for the other criminal released from Wandsworth in error - Algerian flasher Brahim Kaddour-Cherif.