Stuart Harrison (L) and Sumit Narayan (R). Photos / Supplied
A convicted murderer and a violent sex attacker have been caught after a day on the run.
Stuart Martin Harrison and Sumit Carrik escaped from Tongariro's minimum security Rangipo Prison, near Turangi, in the central North Island.
Inspector Earle McIntosh said Narayan told a Turangi man that they
had been rafting but had lost their friends.
Mr McIntosh said police surrounded the house before finding the pair in bed. He said they were arrested without incident.
Harrison and Narayan will appear in the Taupo District Court this morning, charged with escaping custody.
Corrections staff noticed the pair missing yesterday morning and police warned the public not to approach the pair.
Narayan was convicted of aggravated robbery and unlawful sexual connection in 2002 after committing a series of brutal and degrading acts on a prostitute.
On November 12, 2000, he robbed one sex worker he had lured into his car on the pretext of giving him oral sex.
Later the same evening he picked up another woman and also robbed her. When she escaped from his car, he pulled her back by her hair at knifepoint.
He forced her to give him oral sex and performed various acts on her.
Harrison was found guilty in 2005, of murdering Punoua Harvey Tourangi during a March 2004 melee outside the Caltex service station in Papatoetoe.
Riot police who closed down an out-of-control party literally stumbled across the dying 22-year-old as they "herded" partygoers down the road.
The Crown claimed that Harrison "calmly" straddled the already injured man as he lay on the ground and thrust a large knife into his temple.
Earlier this month, Jayden Conroy escaped from a work party at the prison, unlawfully taking a van from a house in Turangi.
Napier police caught him on July 16 only for him to escape again after a cell door at the police station was left open.
He was found four days later hiding under a bed at a house in the Napier suburb of Tamatea.
- NZHERALD STAFF
