The son of train robber Ronnie Biggs is to get a British passport, it has been reported.

The application of Michael Biggs is being reviewed "in the light of relevant circumstances", the Home Office told BBC News Online.

But a spokeswoman refused to confirm reports in The Sun newspaper that the 27-year-old would hear that his application had been successful as early as Wednesday.

The Brazilian citizen has been fighting to stay in Britain indefinitely to visit his sick father.

The train robber and former fugitive is in a hospital wing of top-security Belmarsh Prison, in south-east London, partially paralysed after a number of strokes.

Human rights

Michael Biggs has continued to keep up the pressure for a British passport, even though an immigration adjudicator upheld a Home Office decision to refuse his application.

He launched a fresh appeal against the ruling in March arguing his case under Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, the so-called "right to family life".

Biggs has suffered a number of strokes

Michael Biggs came to the UK in May last year when his fugitive father left Brazil to serve out the rest of his 30-year jail sentence in Britain.

He wants the passport so he can travel freely between the UK and Brazil, where his girlfriend and two-year-old daughter live.

And he has argued that he is the only one who can understand what his ill father says.

Marriage plans

Michael Biggs has said that he does not know anything about a change of heart by the authorities.

His father, now 72, plans to marry Michael's mother Raimunda Rothen in prison on Wednesday, although he still has 28 years to serve.

Biggs was caught and jailed for his part in an ambush on a Glasgow-to-London night train in 1963.

But he escaped from Wandsworth Prison in 1965 and fled abroad, spending most of his time in Rio de Janeiro.