Police Hunt Prisoner Who Forced His Way Out of Lewisham Unit
The Metropolitan Police are searching for Anthony Lloyd, 38, who forced his way out of a health unit in Lewisham on Friday afternoon and was last seen heading towards Catford. He was serving twelve months for assaulting three emergency workers. The force says he should not be approached.
Detective Superintendent Melanie Pressley, who is leading the search, said officers were “conducting various significant inquiries to find Lloyd and return him to custody”, adding: “We are concerned he poses a risk both to himself and the public, and would urge anyone who sees him to call 999 immediately. Do not approach him.” He was jailed last year over an incident in Nottinghamshire and transferred from prison to the Lewisham facility in September; police list links to seven counties. Two things are worth saying about what this is and is not. The three accounts of it differ in their verbs — one says absconded, another escaped — while all three bodies say he forced his way out, which is the formulation used here. And although a prisoner leaving custody from a medical facility invites the question of whether such failures are becoming common, no outlet reports it as part of a pattern, no source prison is identified, and neither the Ministry of Justice nor the prison service appears in any account. On the evidence available tonight this is an incident, not yet a trend.