Killers on run from New York jail likely armed: Police

FBI agents help in the search for convicted murderers Richard Matt and David Sweat in Whippleville, New York. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images/Scott Olson)

NEW YORK: Two US killers on the run from jail are probably armed given the surrounding area is so heavily stocked with weapons and ammunition, police said on Wednesday (Jun 24) on day 19 of a massive manhunt.

Richard Matt, 49, and David Sweat, 35, cut their way out of their cells at the maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility in New York before dawn on June 6 in a spectacular prison break likened to a Hollywood movie.

"Just about every cabin or out building in the north country has one or more shotguns or weapons," Major Charles Guess of New York state police told reporters.

"We have, since day one, operated under the belief that these men are armed. They're extremely dangerous, they're cunning, why wouldn't they try to arm themselves?"

There have been widespread reports that a shotgun is missing from a remote cabin where DNA traces and a bloodied sock indicate they were most likely holed up as late as Saturday morning.

"They put an inordinate amount of weapons and ammunition and other tools in these shared seasonal hunting camps and cabins," Guess said.

Prison worker Joyce Mitchell, charged with facilitating the escape, smuggled the pair hacksaw blades and drill bits, hidden in raw hamburger meat, district attorney Andrew Wylie told local media.

Mitchell stored the meat in a fridge at the tailor shop where she worked, Wylie was quoted as saying.

A corrections officer who has since been placed on administrative leave then delivered it to Matt and Sweat in their cells, The Los Angeles Times reported.

Mitchell's husband told NBC News that his wife enjoyed "attention" and attempted kisses from Matt as their marriage hit a rough patch, but said his wife denied having sex with either inmate.

More than 1,000 US agents are focusing the search on a 75-square mile (194 square kilometre) area within Franklin County.

The terrain is a combination of hills, mountains, ravines, heavy forest, thick undergrowth and dense vegetation, with rivers, streams, ponds and thick bogs complicating the manhunt.

In some areas, visibility was only a few feet or less, and personnel were encountering rain and insect bites, authorities said.

There is a US$100,000 reward for information leading to their arrest.

Matt, who dismembered his boss, and Sweat, who killed a sheriff, used power tools to cut through cell walls and crawled through pipes to emerge from a manhole in the village of Dannemora.

Matt, six feet (1.83 metres) tall with multiple tattoos, was serving a sentence of 25 years to life for the 1997 kidnapping and dismembering of his former boss in a 27-hour ordeal.

He fled to Mexico after the murder and killed another American there, before being sentenced to 20 years and extradited back to New York.

Sweat was serving a life sentence without parole for murdering a sheriff's deputy in New York state in 2002 when he was 22.