Lily Volpert's murder was, unsurprisingly, a shocking and evil crime. The pawnbroker, an established Cardiff shopkeeper and unofficial money lender, had her throat slashed with a razor and bled to the death in the very shop she had spent more than two decades running.
But she was not the only innocent person who paid the ultimate price for that crime. Saturday, September 3, marks 70 years to the day that a blameless seaman, a father to three loving children, was taken from a cell at Cardiff prison and hanged.
Mahmood Hussein Mattan was 28 years old when, on that fateful day in 1952, he became the last person to ever be hanged in Cardiff and the final innocent person to be hanged in Wales – all for a murder he did not commit. This is the sorry story of how two people lost their lives in the most undeserving of circumstances.
