Exploits of escaped prisoner capture nation's imagination

It is a manhunt which has transfixed a nation. After an extraordinary sequence of events, monitoring the progress of Jean-Pierre Treiber, an unprepossessing alleged double-murderer who escaped from prison last month hidden in a cardboard box, is becoming France's favourite spectator sport.

The saga's latest instalment came on Saturday when Le Figaro magazine published grainy but clear surveillance pictures of a bespectacled Treiber, alleged to have poisoned a lesbian couple in 2004 to steal their credit cards, walking peacefully at dusk through the streets of the small country town of Breau in the department of Seine-et-Marne.

The images, leaked to the press, provoked an angry intervention from the Interior Minister, Brice Hortefeux, who spoke of his impatience at the failure to catch the former forestry guard.

So far Treiber, 46, a veteran hunter, accomplished woodsman and survival expert, has evaded sweeps involving hundreds of soldiers, hidden cameras, mobile roadblocks and stakeouts.

Mocking his pursuers, he has sent a series of letters to his girlfriend signed "Jean Jean of the woods" and to media organisations in which he talks of the joys of living rough.

Several have been published in the mass-circulation Paris-Match. The Nouveau Detective compared him with the Count of Monte Cristo, the vengeful hero of Alexandre Dumas' novel.

"I have swapped one prison for another, larger one ... At the moment I am in a very beautiful forest, I think all the different species of trees are here and it's really very lovely," Treiber wrote to his girlfriend. "It is nice with the mist and the deer and the boar."

After his escape from prison in Auxerre on September 8, Treiber is thought to have headed to the forest of Bombon, 40km to the southeast of Paris, close to where he lived and where he is alleged to have committed his crimes.

Last week, a TV crew found a letter left for Treiber by his girlfriend in a tree mentioned as a potential rendezvous point or message-drop in letters he wrote from prison. Officials have blamed the hordes of journalists that have descended on the area for the failure to find him.

Treiber has deliberately stoked media interest, joining the long list of escapers who have fascinated the French public and who have turned to books, newspapers or television to project an image of a wronged rebel single-handedly taking on a repressive state.

The most famous remains Jacques Mesrine, a bank robber and kidnapper who boasted of killing dozens of men and was himself controversially shot dead by police in Paris in 1979 after escaping from a high-security prison.

"It's difficult to see how he [Treiber] is going to stay free forever ... but that, if I understand rightly, isn't his aim," said Georges Moreas, a former policeman and writer. "He wants to get publicity and prove his innocence, and that's something new. Certainly if he does turn up for his trial, as he says he is going to do, then he will certainly have scored a serious point with any jurors."

An international arrest warrant for Treiber has been issued. Officials say there is no indication that he has fled overseas but that his whereabouts are still unknown. Meanwhile, France is eagerly waiting for the next instalment.