£1.4m award for family of wrongfully hanged man Justice for wife and sons of Somali sent to gallows in 1952
Jamie Wilson, Guardian, Monday May 14, 2001

In a landmark case the family of a man hanged 49 years ago for a murder he did not commit has received £1.4m in compensation, it emerged yesterday.

Mahmood Mattan, a Somali, was executed in Cardiff jail in 1952 after being convicted of slitting the throat of Lily Volpert, a pawnbroker and moneylender, at her shop in the Tiger Bay area of the city.

His widow, Laura, only found out he had been hanged when she went to visit him and discovered a notice of his death pinned to a door in the prison.

The family launched a campaign 10 years ago to get Mattan's name cleared. The case went before the criminal case review commission in 1997 and the conviction was quashed in the court of appeal the following year.

The compensation paid by the Home Office is the first award to a family of a person hanged for a crime they did not commit.

The £1.4m was shared between Mrs Mattan, 79, and the couple's three sons David, 53, Omar, 51 and Mervyn, 50. Relatives and friends who joined the campaign to clear Mattan's name were also given a cash handout.

Mrs Mattan, who lives in Ely, Cardiff, did not want to talk yesterday, but her son, Mervyn, said: "The misery for my mother has never gone away and never will. For years she had no help, she was on her own. The money means nothing compared to the suffering she has been through.

"She says she will be angry about it until her dying day. It should never have happened."

Mattan, 28, was arrested within hours of the murder in March 1952. Despite having alibis backed up by four separate witnesses, he was convicted at Glamorganshire assizes in Swansea in July 1952. An appeal was rejected and he was executed in September.

But in the 46 years between his execution and exoneration new evidence emerged that the seaman, who only spoke halting English, was the victim of a miscarriage of justice inflicted by a racist police force and intolerant community. Even his defence lawyer called him "a half child of nature, a semi-civilised savage".

At his trial the prosecution case relied on the evidence of Harold Cover, a Jamaican, who was jailed for life in 1969 for trying to kill his daughter.

He claimed to have seen Mattan in the area where Volpert was killed but the jury was never told that he was paid to give evidence or that four witnesses had failed to pick out Mattan in an identity parade.

Vital information about another Somali, Tehar Gass, who had also been seen by Cover in the area at the time of the murder was also withheld from the court. Two years later Gass was tried for murder and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The judge said Gass was prone to violence against women and was obsessed with knives.

Mrs Mattan, who is Welsh, endured years of abuse from the local community including taunts of "black man's whore" from neighbours who forced the couple to live apart.

"If Mahmood and I had been living in Biblical times we would have been stoned to death," she said after her husband was exonerated in the court of appeal.

"He was a lovely man. He was the best thing that happened to me. He was gentle. He loved this country, and he treated me like a human being, a queen." In September 1996 Mrs Mattan won the first court battle to clear her husband's name when she was permitted to have his quicklimed body exhumed from its felon's grave in Cardiff jail and reburied.