Ex-British Army intelligence officer Colonel Philip Ingram said the key to officers tracing Khalife was him being spotted shortly after he escaped at the BidFood in Wandsworth.
An intelligence expert has said Daniel Khalife made one key mistake which eventually led police straight to him. The 21-year-old former solider spent 75 hours on the run after escaping from HMP Wandsworth on Wednesday morning by strapping himself underneath a delivery van.
He said: "It was only a matter of time before they found him from that point. The clock started ticking. It does not take much effort for the police then to start piecing together all the CCTV that they need and everything else, and get witnesses to come forward. Mr Ingram - who previously told the Mirror cops had a 48-hour window to catch the fugitive - said: "There’s too many not knowns with this, he’s clearly gone to ground for some reason, managed to get a change of clothes. He’s managed to get his hands on a bicycle and other bits and pieces. But we don’t know where he was going or why. He might have thought there’d be less people on a tow path but he wouldn’t have realised the extent of the police operation there was.
Commander Dominic Murphy told reporters at a press briefing on Saturday afternoon that police had reports of further sightings in the Church Street and Chiswick Mall area. On Friday there was also an intelligence-led search of a residential address. This allowed the scope to quickly narrow to one area of the city before Khalife was halted on Rowdell Road in Northolt.
Asked if it is likely he had help from the outside or had simply run out of options, trying to do it all on his own, Mr Ingram said: "On balance I think he probably has had some help from the outside. It’s even more ambitious if he has done it alone but not impossible. He might not have had help. "He might have done. [But] five miles in a built up city, there’s a huge amount of areas he can hide in," he said. "And a huge number of areas he can hide in plain sight. Compared to say five miles in an open countryside environment. The fact he only moved a few miles from the prison, I wouldn’t read too much into that. He would have wanted to go to ground somewhere until all the furore died down before he made any bigger moves. And clearly that’s what he did or was trying to do.
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