Resurrected Briton John Darwin was charged with fraud on Saturday, after he resurfaced a week earlier after a five-year disappearance.

Police thumbed down the canoeist Darwin's claim of amnesia, and decided to sue him for with "offenses of obtaining a money transfer by deception and making an untrue statement... to procure a passport," according to Cleveland Police Detective Sergeant Iain Henderson.

Darwin, 57, was "fit and well," the police said, and they would request to court to continue to hold him in custody.

His wife Anne Darwin, 55, is still in hiding after revealing to two British newspapers that said she went along with his faked death to escape huge debts. She also kept him for years, leaving in Panama City in the last months before her husband's reemergence.

Authorities urged Mrs. Darwin, who is believed to be in Miami, to cooperate with police in the investigation.

"For three years, while virtually everyone close to us believed John was missing, presumed dead, he was actually at home with me," she said in the interview published in the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror tabloids.

Darwin disappeared in an apparent canoeing accident in March 2002 near their home in Seaton Carew, north-eastern England. He was presumed dead after a search mission failed to recover his remains.

But he reappeared last weekend, telling police officers he believed himself to be a missing person and that he could not remember anything.

The Darwin couple was deep in debt when the husband told his wife that faking his own death was the only way out. On March 22, 2002, he took his canoe out to sea and did not return, though the canoe washed up weeks later.

She thought he was dead but in February 2003, he returned to her. He disguised himself when going out and even applied for a passport under the name John Jones.

But middle of this year, Darwin was "sick of being dead," and wanted to reemerge. According to John, however, his wife wanted to cash in on his insurance.