Freedom at last for the Birmingham Six after appeal court victory
The conviction of the Birmingham Six was one of the worst miscarriages of justice in UK criminal history.
Irishmen Hugh Callaghan, Paddy Joe Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and John Walker were jailed for life in 1975 for the Birmingham pub bombings which claimed 21 lives.
But the men were innocent and it was only on this day in 1991 that their names were finally cleared on appeal and they were freed from prison.
They emerged from the Old Bailey in London to cheers from the crowd of supporters massed outside, punching the air, clapping and savouring their first taste of freedom after
16 years and three months in prison.
Paddy Joe Hill seized a microphone and told the crowd: “The police told us from the start that they knew we hadn’t done it.”
Gesturing to the most famous criminal court in the country, he added: “Justice? I don’t think those people in there have the intelligence to spell the world, never mind dispense it. They’re rotten.”
Justice has also never been done for the families of the 21 people who perished when two pubs – the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern In The Town – were bombed on the night of November 21, 1974. A third device failed to explode.
The bombings were at the time the worst peace-time atrocity in the UK, and also injured more than 200 people who had been enjoying a Thursday night out.
A coded warning call made by the Provisional IRA did not pinpoint the locations of the bombs.
The six men who would be framed then wrongly convicted were all from Northern Ireland and had been living in Birmingham since the 1960s.
That night, five of them were on their way back to Belfast for the funeral of an IRA man whom some had been childhood friends with and who had been blown up while assembling a bomb in Coventry. The sixth had seen them off at the train station.
Word of the Birmingham attacks soon reached the ports, and the five men were held at a routine security check in Lancashire as they waited for the ferry, then handed over to West Midlands Police.
Chris Mullin, the journalist-turned Labour MP who would play a key role in securing their freedom, would later say they “were in the wrong place at the wrong time”.
The men were threatened and subjected to vicious beatings until four of them signed statements implicating all six.
Their convictions the following year were inevitable, but they were not the killers. An application to appeal was turned down in 1980, and it was only when Mr Mullin, by then working on the investigative TV programme World In Action, took up their case that the campaign to exonerate them gained momentum.
He identified that the case against them had rested on the confessions and unreliable forensic evidence which appeared to show – wrongly – that they had handled explosives.
A former West Midlands police constable came forward to confirm that “violent tactics” had been used by the force’s Serious Crime Squad.
After another failed appeal in 1988, the Birmingham Six were finally cleared in 1991 and handed their freedom.
The real killers have never been caught.