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Hunt for Fugitives in Remote Corner of Canada Set to Join List of World’s Greatest Manhunts

© REUTERS / Christian HartmannFrench spolice stop and search a local resident as shots are exchanged in Saint-Denis, France, near Paris, November 18, 2015 during an operation to catch fugitives from Friday night's deadly attacks in the French capital
French spolice stop and search a local resident as shots are exchanged in Saint-Denis, France, near Paris, November 18, 2015 during an operation to catch fugitives from Friday night's deadly attacks in the French capital - Sputnik International
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Canadian police have pulled out of the remote town of York Landing after failing to catch two teenage fugitives suspected of carrying out three murders. Sputnik looks at the case and some of the world’s most famous manhunts.

Two Canadian teenagers who are suspected of killing a college professor, an American woman and her Australian boyfriend, remain on the loose despite an intensive manhunt in northern Manitoba.

Kam McLeod and Bryer Schmegelsky are believed to have carried out the murders in British Columbia and then drove east through the states of Alberta and Saskatchewan before finally abandoning their car near the town of Gillam in Manitoba.

​The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have used dogs, drones, helicopters, boats and even a Canadian Air Force Hercules plane to scour the area around York Landing, Manitoba, after a neighbourhood watch group reportedly sighted the pair.

​But the Mounties have now withdrawn from the area and are focusing again on woods around the town of Gillam, where the suspects’ car was found burned out last week.

McLeod, 19, and Schmegelsky, 18, have been charged in absentia with the second-degree murder of Leonard Dyck, a University of British Columbia professor, and are also the prime suspects in the killing of Chynna Deese and Lucas Fowler, who were shot dead on 15 July about 300 miles away.

​The forests around Gillam are known to contain many bears as well as “relentless” insects and the teenagers are not believed to have had any training for survival in the wilderness.

​The manhunt is the largest in Canada’s history.

Here are some other famous manhunts, most of which have ended badly for the fugitives.

Bonnie and Clyde

In the 1920s and 1930s the United States was hit by a crime wave as desperate people, facing unemployment in the Depression, took to robbing banks and trains.

One of the most famous gangs of desperadoes was the one headed by Clyde Barrow and his girlfriend Bonnie Parker.

After the pair were linked to a string of crimes in the Midwest the FBI issued a warrant for their arrest in May 1933.

Almost exactly a year later the pair were ambushed by a posse of police officers and Texas Rangers near Sailes in rural Louisiana and gunned down.

But their legend lived on, boosted by the popular 1967 movie, Bonnie & Clyde, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.

Osama Bin Laden

Osama Bin Laden was the Saudi-born millionaire who founded al-Qaeda and was behind a string of atrocities, including the bombing of two US embassies in east Africa in 1998.

His whereabouts remained a mystery until 11 September 2001 when al-Qaeda terrorists took over four planes and killed 3,000 people in their infamous attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

The US and their allies invaded Afghanistan, believing Bin Laden was hiding behind the aprons of his Taliban protectors.

Bin Laden fled into the famous Tora Bora cave complex and then vanished completely for a decade, popping up now and then to send video messages in which he threatened the US or took responsibility for terrorist outrages.

In 2011 the CIA discovered Bin Laden was hiding in plain sight - in a compound near a Pakistani army base in Abbotabad.

The US government decided not to tell the Pakistanis - fearing they would leak the information to Bin Laden - and on 1 May 2011 a team of US Navy Seals entered the compound and shot him dead.

President Barack Obama, watching the operation at the White House, celebrated: "We got him."

Bin Laden’s body was buried at sea to prevent his burial site becoming a shrine.

Raoul Moat

In July 2010 Raoul Moat, a nightclub bouncer from Newcastle, gunned down his ex-girlfriend, Samantha Stobbart, and her new boyfriend, Chris Brown, before going on the run.

Moat, who had only recently been released from Durham prison, then attacked a police officer, PC David Rathband, shooting him in the head and blinding him.

Rathband survived - although he would later commit suicide - and Moat became Public Enemy Number One.

He was eventually tracked down to a rural area near the village of Rothbury, north of Newcastle.

Surrounded by armed police, Moat refused to surrender despite the comical intervention of former Newcastle and England football legend Paul Gascoigne.

Moat eventually shot himself as the police closed in.

Saddam Hussein

In March 2003 British and US troops invaded southern Iraq from Kuwait after a bogus intelligence dossier claimed he was in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs).

As US troops approached Baghdad in April 2003, the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein fled and headed for his home town of Tikrit, where he went into hiding.

Saddam released audio tapes urging the Iraqi people to resist the Americans and was put at the top of the list of Most Wanted Iraqis by the occupying forces.

In July 2003 his sons Uday and Qusay were killed in a shootout with the Americans.

Finally, in December 2003, a heavily bearded Saddam was discovered hiding in a hole in the ground near Tikrit.

Saddam was put on trial by the pro-US Iraqi government and was convicted of crimes against humanity in November 2006 and executed the following month.

John Dillinger

In the 1930s the US government had no Muslim terrorists to worry about and its “Public Enemy Number One” was John Dillinger, a bank robber who had been born to a middle class family in Indianapolis.

Between September 1933 and July 1934 he and his gang terrorised the Midwest, killing 10 men, robbing banks and police arsenals, and staging three jail breaks.

On 22 July 1934 - Dillinger’s 31st birthday - he was on the run in Chicago but had decided to go to the cinema with his girlfriend, Polly Hamilton and her friend Anna.

But Anna, a prostitute who feared deportation to her native Romania and had an eye on the US$5,000 reward, had tipped off the FBI.

Agents lay in wait outside the Biograph Theater, where Dillinger and the women had seen the Clark Gable hit Manhattan Melodrama.  

Moments before he was ambushed, Dillinger instinctively reached for his pistol and ran towards an alley but was gunned down by three FBI agents.

The FBI now had a vacancy for Public Enemy Number One.

Jacques Mesrine

France’s most notorious manhunt was for the master criminal Jacques Mesrine, whose life was turned into a film, starring Vincent Cassel, in 2008.

Mesrine, a former soldier who had been given a medal by General Charles de Gaulle for his counter-insurgency work in Algeria, drifted into crime in the 1960s and then fled to Canada, where he associated with Quebec nationalists.

In 1972 he escaped from prison in Quebec and eventually returned to France but was recaptured and locked up in Paris’s La Sante prison, which was at the time considered escape-proof.

Mesrine of course escaped from it in 1978 and remained a fugitive for another 18 months.

On 2 November 1979 Mesrine and his girlfriend were driving a distinctive gold BMW through Paris when they were ambushed by gendarmes who had been hiding in a truck.

Twenty rounds were fired at point blank range into Mesrine. His girlfriend Sylvia Jeanjacquot survived but lost an eye.

The Tsarnaev brothers

On 15 April 2013 two Chechen brothers detonated a bomb close to the finishing line for the Boston Marathon, killing three people.

The FBI released photos of suspects Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother Dzhokhar, who had shot and killed an MIT campus police officer, stolen a car and thrown explosives at police officers who tried to chase them.

​Tamerlan was shot and killed by police but Dzhokhar vanished into a residential neighbourhood, sparking a huge manhunt.

Residents of Boston were told to "shelter in place” and roadblocks were set up around the city.

Four days after the bombing police and FBI found Dzhokhar hiding beneath a tarpaulin on a boat in the back garden of a house in the Watertown district.

The total cost of the manhunt was estimated at US$1 billion.

In 2015 Tsarnaev was sentenced to death.

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