In 1974, knowing that he was, as he puts it, “a nervous individual” and afraid of dogs, the police put alsatians into Hugh Callaghan’s cell. They ordered them to attack him, before restraining them at the last minute. “I still have nightmares about it,” he says, now 92, sitting in the peaceful London home he shares with his partner, Adeline. There have been times, she says, when he has woken up three times a night, screaming. If he sees someone with an alsatian, he crosses the road to avoid it.
This is not a tale from Lukashenko’s Belarus, but from Birmingham, England, and is one of many gruesome details of the case of the Birmingham Six, in which six men spent 16 years in prison for a crime of which they were entirely innocent. It is shocking not only for this fact, but also for the brutal methods of the police, and their decades-long efforts, with the help of some judges and sections of the media, to insist – in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary – on the men’s guilt.
