Top 10 Villains On FBI Hit List

Bureau’s most wanted chart is 70 today... Here we look at its worst offenders

It's the ultimate list of shame – the FBI’s Most Wanted – and today the notorious rogues’ gallery of fugitives turns 70. And since it was first launched on March 14, 1950, on the orders of the US crime agency’s director J Edgar Hoover, the infamous top 10 has featured some of the world’s most dangerous criminals. Impressively, 488 out of the 523 fugitives who have been placed on the list over the years have been caught.

Here JAMES MOORE looks 10 of the most infamous villains to appear on it…

1. OSAMA BIN LADEN Fugitive 456

He became the world’s No1 villain after orchestrating the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001 that left more than 3,000 dead.

But the al-Qaida leader had, by that time, already been on the Most Wanted list for two years after being sought in connection with the 1998 bombings of America’s embassies in Tanzania and Kenya that had killed 200.

He would end up with a multi-million pound reward on his head but eluded justice for a decade.

Bin Laden was finally shot and killed, aged 54, in a US Navy Seals operation on May 2, 2011, in Pakistan.

2. JAMES EARL RAY Fugitive 277 & 351

On April 4, 1968, civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King Jr was shot and killed on the balcony of his secondfloor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

Police quickly found a rifle bearing the fingerprints of small-time crook James Earl Ray in a nearby building. The FBI launched a manhunt but the assassin had quickly fled to Canada and then London.

But that June his luck ran out when he was stopped trying to board a flight from Heathrow to Brussels on a false passport. Back in the US he pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison.