FARCE AS RONNIE BIGGS IS FREED

He said: “We are very hopeful that my father will be able to survive the next few days.

“My father at present, is not capable of walking is not capable of reading, writing, speaking he cannot eat or drink, he has no control over his throat so the saliva goes down his windpipe and into his lungs."

Today calls for the review of hundreds of other elderly prisoners was mounting, despite one union chief insisting Biggs was "no Robin Hood."

Juliet Lyon, Prison Reform Trust director, said: “Our prisons are filling up with infirm, elderly people for whom that bleak environment serves as a double punishment.

Ronnie's son Michael is overjoyed with his father's release

“The Justice Secretary will now need to give thought to the hundreds of prisoners over the age of 70, who - if they are still considered a danger to the public - should be held in secure homes for the elderly rather than in prisons which, day in, day out, run in breach of the Disability Discrimination Act.

“Prison is no place to grow old and die if there is any way that can be avoided.”

Mr Straw chose to release Biggs on compassionate grounds after medical evidence showed that he was not expected to recover from a bout of pneumonia.

Gang leader Bruce Reynolds said: “I’m overjoyed for Ronnie, and certainly overjoyed for Michael, who’s worked tirelessly to get his father released from prison.

“I would like to point out that actually, although he’s been given compassionate release, in actual fact it falls in line with the majority of time served by the rest of the team that committed the Great Train Robbery.”

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Biggs’ son Michael said the decision was “good news for the taxpayer," adding his father was sorry he committed a crime but repentance was “something that you deal with priests."

Biggs, who yesterday said he was “over the moon” with the news of his release, is set to undergo minor surgery today to change a tube in his stomach.

His family hopes he will survive long enough to see his 80th birthday on Saturday.

Only last month Mr Straw rejected Biggs’s application for parole on the grounds that the robber was “wholly unrepentant” about his crimes.

He said today: “The medical evidence clearly shows that Mr Biggs is very ill and that his condition has deteriorated recently, culminating in his re-admission to hospital. His condition is not expected to improve.

“It is for that reason that I am granting Mr Biggs compassionate release on medical grounds.”

The three Prison Service staff watching Biggs are set to be withdrawn, once the licence for his release is finalised.

After a series of strokes, he is bedridden, fed through a tube and barely able to communicate.

Biggs, from Lambeth, south London, was a member of a 15-strong gang which attacked the Glasgow to London mail train at Ledburn, Buckinghamshire, in August 1963, and made off with £2.6 million in used banknotes.

He was given a 30-year sentence but after 15 months he escaped from Wandsworth prison in south-west London by climbing a 30ft wall and fleeing in a furniture van.

Biggs was on the run for more than 30 years, living in Australia and Brazil before returning to the UK voluntarily in 2001 to hand himself in.

He was locked up in Belmarsh high-security prison on his return before being moved to a specialist medical unit at Norwich prison.

Biggs’s legal adviser, Giovanni Di Stefano, said: “He is being released effectively to die and that cannot be considered a victory. But it’s a victory for common sense and Mr Straw has made the right decision.”

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