Birmingham Six
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- For the Danish band, see Birmingham 6 (band).
The Birmingham Six were six men—Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and John Walker—sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975 in an infamous miscarriage of justice for two pub bombings in Birmingham, England on November 21, 1974 that killed 21 people. Their convictions were overturned by the Court of Appeal on March 14, 1991. The convictions were overturned largely on the basis that traces of nitroglycerine found on their bodies could have come from innocuous sources such as soap. The judge at the appeal famously declared of the police witnesses at the original trial "They must have lied." Although the Balcombe Street Gang admitted responsibility for the bombings which led to the wrongful imprisonment of the Maguire Seven and the Guildford Four, the perpetrators of the Birmingham bombings were never revealed.
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[edit] Birmingham pub bombings
The Birmingham bombings were attributed to the Provisional IRA, although the group denied this two days later (they eventually conceded that they were responsible). The devices were placed in two central Birmingham pubs: the Mulberry Bush (later renamed, then redeveloped in 2003 as a tourist information office, now being redeveloped again into luxury apartments), at the foot of the Rotunda, and the Tavern in the Town, a basement pub on New Street (later renamed the Yard of Ale). The resulting explosions, at 20:25 and 20:27, collectively were the most injurious and serious terrorist blasts on the island of Britain up until that point; 21 people were killed (ten at the Mulberry Bush and eleven at the Tavern in the Town) and 182 people were injured. A third device, outside a bank on Hagley Road, failed to detonate.
[edit] Arrests and questioning
Five of the six men arrested were Belfast-born. John Walker was born in Derry. All six had lived in Birmingham since the 1960s. Five of the men, Hill, Hunter, McIlkenny, Power and Walker, had left the city on the early evening of November 21 from New Street Station, shortly before the explosions. They were travelling to Belfast to attend the funeral of James McDade, an IRA member who had accidentally killed himself while planting a bomb in Coventry (Hill was also intending to see an aunt in Belfast who was sick and not expected to live). They were seen off from the station by Callaghan. When they reached Heysham they and others were subject to a Special Branch stop and search. The men did not tell the police of the true purpose of their visit to Belfast, a fact that was later held against them. While the search was in progress the police were informed of the Birmingham bombings. The men agreed to be taken to Morecambe police station for forensic tests.
On the morning of November 22, after the forensic tests and routine questioning, the men were transferred to the custody of West Midlands Serious Crime Squad police unit. All men were interrogated by Birmingham CID and were beaten, threatened and forced to sign statements written by the police over three days of questioning. Callaghan was taken into custody on the evening of November 22.
[edit] Trial
On May 12, 1975 the six men were charged with murder and conspiracy to cause explosions. Three other men, James Kelly, Michael Murray and Michael Sheehan, were charged with conspiracy and Kelly and Sheehan also faced charges of unlawful possession of explosives.
The trial began on June 9, 1975 in Lancaster, England. After legal arguments the statements the men had made in November were deemed admissible as evidence. The accused repudiated the confessions at the trial. The other evidence against the men was largely circumstantial, through their association with IRA members. Although Hill and Power had tested positive for the Greiss test for handling explosives the later sample tests were inconclusive. The jury found the six men guilty of murder and on August 15, 1975 they were sentenced to life terms. The judge expressed regret that capital punishment was no longer an option.
[edit] Appeals
In March 1976 their first appeal was dismissed.
Journalist (and later Labour MP and Government minister) Chris Mullin investigated the case for Granada TV's World in Action series. In 1985, the first of several World in Action programmes casting serious doubt on the men's convictions was broadcast. In 1986, Mullin's book, Error of Judgment - The Truth About the Birmingham Pub Bombings, set out a detailed case supporting the men's innocence including his claim to have met with some of those actually responsible for the bombings. Home Secretary Douglas Hurd MP referred the case back to the Court of Appeal.
In January 1988, after a six week hearing (at that time the longest criminal appeal hearing ever held), the men's convictions were upheld. The appeal judges, under the Lord Chief Justice Lord Lane, in their summing up strongly supported the original conviction. Over the next three years newspaper articles, television documentaries and books brought forward new evidence to question the conviction while campaign groups calling for the men's release sprang up across Britain, Ireland, Europe and the USA.
Their third appeal, in 1991, was successful. They were represented by noted human rights solicitor, Gareth Peirce. New evidence of police fabrication and suppression of evidence, the discrediting of both the confessions and the 1975 forensic evidence led to the Crown withdrawing most of its case against the men. In 2001, a decade after their release, the six men were awarded compensation ranging from £840,000 to £1.2 million.
[edit] Consequences
The collapse of the case and other miscarriages of justice caused the Home Secretary to set up a Royal Commission on Criminal Justice in 1991. The commission reported in 1993 and led to the Criminal Appeal Act of 1995 and the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission in 1997. None of the policemen involved were ever prosecuted.
Richard McIlkenny died in a Dublin hospital on May 21, 2006, following a lengthy battle with cancer.
