Paddy Hill, one of six men wrongly convicted for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings who went on to set up an organisation dedicated to helping others facing miscarriages of justice, has died aged 80.
Cathy Molloy, the recently retired chief executive officer of the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation (Mojo), which Hill founded, said he “died peacefully at his home in Ayrshire, cared for by his wife, Tara, on Monday morning”.
Malloy said Hill was “my hero, a great friend, and a great boss”, who had dedicated his final years to helping others through Mojo, which he had set up “with his own compensation, itself never adequate reparation for what his experience was”.
Hill spent 16 years in prison after being found guilty of murder in connection to the Birmingham pub bombings, which killed 21 people and injured 182. He was convicted along with five other Northern Irish men: Gerry Hunter, John Walker, Hugh Callaghan, Richard McIlkenny and William Power.
Their convictions were declared unsafe and quashed by the court of appeal in 1991, after an investigation by the journalist and former Labour MP Chris Mullin, who claimed to have tracked down the men responsible for the bombings.
The six wrongly convicted men said they were forced into making false confessions during brutal police interrogation.
In 2010, Hill described his experience to the Guardian: “They jammed a pistol in my mouth and smashed it around, breaking my teeth so badly it was agony to even have a sip of water until I finally saw a dentist, two weeks later.
“They told me they knew I was innocent but that they didn’t care: they had been told to get a conviction and that if I didn’t admit to the bombing, they would shoot me in the mouth.”
Hill spoke out about the lack of counselling and mental health support for victims of miscarriages of justice, saying: “There was no lack of money for falsely imprisoning us, torturing us and putting us through a kangaroo court.
“But when we came out, there was a sudden shortage of memory and of money. It was the state that took us hostage and traumatised us and now they don’t want to recognise that in any shape or form.”
He set up the Glasgow-based Mojo, helping others who were falsely imprisoned, in 2001. “I think it speaks absolute volumes of the man that he was, because he not only was living with his own experience, he was reliving everybody’s experience, because he knew what these guys were going through,” said Molloy. “He had a heart of gold, he really did.”
In 1996, Hill published the book Forever Lost, Forever Gone about his mistreatment in prison, the process of proving his innocence and adjusting to the world after his release.
He is the third member of the Birmingham Six to die. McIlkenny died of cancer in 2006, aged 73, and Callaghan died in 2023, aged 93.
No one has been held to account for the 1974 Birmingham atrocity, and the victim’s families continue to call for a public inquiry.
