A fraudster who was wrongly released from prison this week has handed himself in at HMP Wand Wandsworth, in Southwest London, Surrey police said.
William Smith, 35, commonly known as Billy Smith, was sentenced to 45 months for several offenses in a video link from prison Monday.
A clerical error by the Court led to the prison being told it was a suspended sentence, which meant he did not have to be arrested. The court corrected the error but did not inform HMP Wand Wandsworth.
Surrey Police launched a manhunt for him because of his links to woking. Smith identified the intruder at the gates of HMP Wand Wandsworth and took himself into custody.
He was last seen wearing a Navy jumper with a white Nike logo on the front, a Navy Tracksuit with a white Nike logo on the left pocket, and black trainers, black trainers, police said.
An Algerian Sex Center offender, Ibrahim Kaddour-Cherif, 24, who was released from Wandsworth in error last week, remains at large.
Those who met the police, who hunted him, were told only about his release on Tuesday and expressed frustration in his “six-day head start”.
The number of prisoners released by mistake has more than doubled in a year, official figures show.
In the year to March, 262 were released by mistake, compared to 115 last year, according to data from the Ministry of Justice.
Prison sources say the overcrowding crisis is blamed on a sharp increase in “error releases” – the official description for errors.