Now post staff fight to have thef t slurs quashed

‘Some people were calling us thieves’

POSTMASTERS who claim they were wrongly jailed for theft are to spearhead Britain’s largest ever miscarriage of justice case.

Their lives were ruined when money apparently went missing from their branches. But it later emerged that the counter-top terminals were riddled with bugs.

The Post Office eventually settled a long-running High Court case brought by 550 former postmasters who were wrongly accused, agreeing to pay them £58million last year.

And yesterday the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which examines miscarriages of justice, revealed that it is considering pleas from 56 of them to have their convictions quashed.

In a letter to claimants, it says it will decide this month whether to refer the cases to the Appeal Court. If it referred them all, it would be the biggest miscarriage of justice case in the commission’s history.

Jo Hamilton was convicted after her terminal in South Warnborough, Hampshire, recorded inexplicable losses of £36,000. She said: ‘This is the first time in five years I have felt optimistic about my conviction being overturned.

‘The mood changed in their letter and when I hear that there will be a meeting of commissioners in March, I am very optimistic. Justice is coming.’

The Post Office settled the High Court case after being lambasted by the judge. It had spent years battling its postal veterans and fiercely denying any problem with its IT system. It blew an estimated £32million on legal costs fighting the mammoth series of interlinked High Court trials.

Mr Justice Fraser said the Post Office’s longrunning refusal to accept its computer system was faulty ‘amounts to the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the Earth is flat’.

Former Edinburgh sub-postmaster Kashif Nadeem, 32, who paid the Post Office £28,000 after being threatened with prosecution, was among those wrongly accused. Last month, Mr Nadeem, who ran his post office with his father Mohammed, told The Sunday Post: ‘My dad had worked for years after arriving from Pakistan and had become a pillar of the community. Now some people were calling us thieves. We want a voice. We need people to know what happened to us.’

Ian Murray, Labour MP for Edinburgh South, wants a full judge-led public inquiry, which he said was needed to ‘get to the bottom of this scandal’.

The Post Office said: ‘We are assisting the CCRC to the fullest extent with inquiries concerning past convictions of a number of former postmasters.’