Hundreds of law enforcement officers stepped up their hunt in western New York state for two convicted murderers who escaped from an upstate prison more than two weeks ago, as another possible sighting of the men was reported in a new search area.
The manhunt centered on the town of Friendship, located about 450km southwest of the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, near the Canadian border, where the escaped convicts were serving life sentences for murder.
The search in Friendship was winding down by Sunday night, but increased patrols will stay in the area, New York State Police spokesman Beau Duffy said.
Photo: Reuters
“We will continue to search this area until all leads have been exhausted,” New York State Police Major Michael Cerretto said on Sunday. “As we have in other areas of this state, we will search under every rock, behind every tree and structure until we are confident that that area is secure.”
State police received a call early on Saturday afternoon from a witness who spotted two men with descriptions similar to the escaped convicts, Richard Matt and David Sweat, on a railroad line in Friendship, Cerretto said.
Police interviewed the witness at length and determined that the witness was credible and the lead should be investigated, Cerretto said, calling the sighting “unconfirmed.”
A secure perimeter was established around the area of the sighting and roadblocks were set up, Cerretto said at a brief press conference. He made no mention of other sightings in the area.
The Buffalo News reported that a civilian told police that he believed he had seen two men fitting the descriptions of the convicts walking along a road in Friendship on Sunday morning.
A spokesman for the New York State Police declined comment on the report.
Matt, 48, and Sweat, 35, cut through their cell walls and crawled through a steam pipe before emerging from a manhole outside the prison, authorities said. The pair was discovered missing on June 6.
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
Hong Kong microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung (袁國勇) has done battle with some of the world’s worst threats, including the SARS virus he helped isolate and identify, and he has a warning. Another pandemic is inevitable and could exact damage far worse than COVID-19 pandemic, said the soft-spoken scientist sometimes thought of as Hong Kong’s answer to former US National Institutes of Health director Anthony Fauci. “Both the public and [world] leaders must admit that another pandemic will come, and probably sooner than you anticipate,” he said at the city’s Queen Mary Hospital, where he works and teaches. “Why I make such a horrifying prediction
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,
AIRLINES RECOVERING: Two-thirds of the flights canceled on Saturday due to the faulty CrowdStrike update that hit 8.5 million devices worldwide occurred in the US As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain. Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals around the world about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage. “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant