The Birmingham Framework
'Six Innocent Men Framed for the Birmingham Bombings' by Fr. Denis Faul and Fr. Raymond Murray (1976) an 82-page paperback now out of print, originally published in Ireland 1976 by the authors.

17 June 2002

'I'm dead inside'

Last week it was reported that Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six would receive a huge payout for his 16 years in prison. But, he says, nothing can compensate him for what he has been through

By Simon Hattenstone

Eleven years after his release from jail, Paddy Hill is back in the news. It has been reported that Hill, the best known of the Birmingham Six who were wrongly convicted of planting the pub bombs that killed 21 people in 1974, is to receive £1m compensation. I phone him to ask if he would agree to an interview. Silence. Then he erupts. "No. I would not. Not after that fucking shite in the newspapers last week. I am not getting £1m, nothing has been agreed, and I did not talk to the newspaper that quoted me."

I hold the phone away from my burning ear, and say I would also like to talk to him about Mojo, the organisation he set up to fight miscarriages of justice. In the early 90s he gave a rare and desperate interview in which he admitted he could no longer feel anything for anybody in the world beyond his mum, his girlfriend Alison and those wrongfully jailed. Since then, he has split up with Alison and his mother has died.

Despite his anger, it's been a good week for Hill. He has just heard that one of his close friends, Satpal Ram, will be released from prison after the government conceded its right to keep him jailed against the parole board's recommendation. Ram is a typical Mojo case - he always claimed he stabbed a man in self-defence after he was attacked in a Birmingham restaurant in 1986, but he was later convicted of murder. The more we talk about Mojo, the more Hill softens. Eventually, he says, I should pop round to his office just down the road from the Guardian in Farringdon, London.

In the photos we used to see of Hill in the newspapers, when he was one of Britain's most hated men, he had jet black hair in a pudding basin cut, mutton-chop sideboards, and a scar across his lower cheek. He was 12 stone, and a stocky bruiser. Today he is skinny, with white hair. He still looks tough, though. His blue eyes - part ice, part fire - defy you to see what they have seen. "Prison kills you a little bit each day, and sooner or later you wake up and you don't feel nothing," he says, stressing every word, slowly, deliberately. "Me, I died in prison, inside."