Post office where man was gunned down closes

FAIRFIELD Village Post Office, the tragic scene where a postmaster’s son was murdered by Birmingham armed robbers, is closing today (Thursday).

The post office in the small Worcestershire village near Bromsgrove remained open after Craig Hodson-Walker was killed in 2009, but the current sub-postmaster has resigned saying that pressures of short-staffing, Covid and lack of income because of people going online instead are to blame.

However, the Post Office Service said this would be a “temporary” closure with the vacancy advertised.

Kam Ohri, who helps runs the post office with sub-postmaster husband Sunny, apologised to villagers saying: “We have been struggling a long time with the running of the post office due to staff shortage, reduction of income due to online car tax and then Covid.

“We’ve found it hard to make ends meet and can’t afford to keep it going and survive on the income from the post office, which has been reduced in recent years. We used to do 600 car taxes a month and make about £700 but now we are lucky if we do four.

“It is a shame and head office has known for a long time that we were struggling. We asked if we could only open a few days a week, but they refused. We do parcels but slowly all the other things a post office does has been taken away.”

The couple own the building and will keep it but it will no longer run a post office from the site.

The couple bought the post office from the Hodson-Walker family after the tragedy in May 2011. Craig, 29, helped run the post office with his parents Ken and Judy Hodson-Walker and bravely armed himself with a cricket bat to defend the business when confronted by a three-strong masked gang on the morning of January 9, 2009.

He went up against career criminal Anselm Ribera, who shot him dead with a 9mm handgun and injured 57-year-old Ken in the leg. The gang that killed Craig fled empty handed but were later caught in an operation across West Mercia Police and West Midlands Police.