Mahmoud Mattan, a British-Somali man was hanged to death in September 1952 after being convicted of murder. The father of three was wrongly found guilty of the murder of shopkeeper Lily Volpert in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay. At just 28 years old, the British-Somali seaman was the last man to be executed in Wales following a horrible court case. His wife and family fought for years to prove his innocence.
Forty-six years after he was executed, he was posthumously acquitted after authorities found evidence had been mostly fabricated and manipulated by police at the time, BBC reported. Today, The Fortune Men, a novel about Mattan’s story, has been longlisted for the Booker Prize. Somali-born woman Nadifa Mohamed, whose father met Mattan when the two emigrated to Hull, is the author of the book.
A Brief History
“People who knew him said he was spikey, brave, happy to stand up for his rights and for those of the people around him,” Mohamed said of Mattan. “I believe that is, in part, why the police had singled him out to take the blame for the next major crime to be committed in the area.”
Born in what’s now Somaliland in 1922, Mattan arrived in Butetown, otherwise referred to as Tiger Bay or The Docks, within the 1940s. a bit like many others who arrived to figure there from different parts of British Empire including British Somaliland, Mattan got employment on a ship. He met Laura Williams from the Rhondda Valley, who was then 17 and was working during a paper factory.
The two got married three months after they met. it had been tough for the 2 as interracial couples were unwelcomed. albeit that they had three sons, they found it difficult to seek out an area where they were allowed to measure together. So Mattan and his wife lived separately, in several houses on an equivalent street. Then disaster occurred.
How He Was Incriminated
On the evening of March 6, 1952, someone slit the throat of shopkeeper and moneylender Volpert at her shop in Butetown, Cardiff, shortly from the docks. Police found her dead during a pool of blood, her throat cut by a razor. The sum of £100 (more than $4,000 today) had been stolen. When the police questioned people including Mattan, he told them he wasn’t on Bute Street that day but at a cinema. He said he was at the cinema until 7:30 pm then went home. The murder happened at 8.15 pm.
The police searched Mattan’s house but produced no evidence. However, he was arrested following a press release a Jamaican man, Harold Cover, told the police. Cover said he saw a Somali with a gold tooth and no hat or overcoat leaving Volpert’s patronize the time of the murder. Meanwhile, Mattan didn’t have gold teeth, and other people who saw him that evening, before and after the murder, said he was wearing a hat and coat, BBC reported. It emerged recently that Cover identified the person he saw as another Somali called Taher Grass.
Yet, Cover gave the police a second statement, which was discrepant together with his first. This was after the Volpert family had offered a £200 reward. At the trial, Cover said he saw Mattan leaving the patronize 8.15 pm. Meanwhile, four other witnesses who had been round the shop on the evening of the murder didn’t pick Mattan out at an identification parade. The police withheld this evidence from the jury and defense. They also didn’t disclose Cover’s first statement about Grass.
To make matters worse, Mattan’s own defense counsel, T E Rhys-Roberts, in his closing speech, described his client as “this half-child of nature, a semi-civilised savage”.
Mattan was found guilty and sentenced to death. British Somali seaman wasn’t allowed leave to appeal. He was hanged in Cardiff Prison on September 3, 1952. “I still believed right up to the top that they might let him go, but they didn’t, they hung him,” Laura, Mattan’s wife, was quoted by the Independent in 1997.
“When they did that I just locked myself away in my room with my kids, then for a few time afterwards I wont to think I could see him walking down the road towards me. He was a really good husband and father,” she said of Mattan.
Authorities didn’t let Laura know of her husband’s execution as she only acknowledged when she visited visit him in prison.
Cover, whose evidence sent Mattan to his death, was later jailed for all times for attempting to murder his daughter by slashing her throat with a razor. Grass was also convicted in 1954 for the murder of a person . He was however found acquitted on grounds of insanity.
His Sentence
In the 1990s when the Criminal Cases Review Commission was found out , Mattan’s case was the primary to be mentioned it. His conviction was finally overturned by the Commission in 1998, the primary case to be quashed by the organization. Lord Justice Rose described the case as ‘demonstrably flawed’, saying that there was a scarcity of evidence including an entire absence of forensic evidence connecting Mattan to the murder of Volpert. Mattan’s family was awarded £1.4m, the primary time the house Office compensated the family of a person who had been wrongly hanged.
Laura died 10 years after the compensation. Mattan’s children also are no more, although a number of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren are often found in Cardiff today. Last September, a vigil was held outside Cardiff Prison to recollect Mattan. His granddaughter Natasha Grech spoke at the event: “Everybody knew that my grandfather was innocent. My mum and pop always said the impact it had on the community was really awful.
“Mahmoud’s sons were ridiculed, bullied, outcast. They couldn’t do normal things. Everyone called them ‘murderer’s children’, my dad hated that especially afterward in life once they actually pardoned him.”
“All of these lost years, all of that point . Things could’ve been so different for the three sons. They grew up without a father.” (Scooper)
