A Belfast man, who was the last person to be sentenced to death in the United Kingdom, has had his conviction for murdering a British soldier in 1972 quashed. Liam Holden spent 17 years in jail after being convicted. His death sentence was commuted to a life term.
At the time, he told the court he was forced to sign a confession after soldiers threatened to kill him and used water torture on him. On Thursday last, the Court of Appeal in Belfast overturned his conviction.
Explaining what had happened to him 40 years ago in a barracks that had been set up at Black Mountain School, Holden said: "I was dragged into a cubicle and soldiers came in and started questioning me about the IRA." Holden, now 58, who was not a member of the organization.
"Then they directed the questioning to the killing of the soldier and asked me if I knew about it. I told them that I knew a soldier was shot at the top of Springhill Avenue, like everyone else knew, but then they said I had done it. I denied it right away, obviously. They questioned me more about the soldier but again they were not getting any information other than the fact that I knew the soldier was shot. "It was then that Holden's interrogators began to subject him to water torture. "They brought five or six other soldiers in. They held me down on the floor and placed a towel over my face. They got water and slowly poured the water over the towel, all over my face," he explained.
"They did that until I was close to passing out. They then got me up, put me on a chair and started questioning me again and I gave them the same answer. They did that [water torture] to me three, four, maybe five times and they still got the same response every time."
Holden was then driven across the city, hooded, and taken to the Glencairn area of North Belfast for a mock execution.
"They brought me into the middle of a field, put a gun against my head and told me that if I didn't admit to killing the soldier that I would be dead, they would just shoot me then. So I said I did it. They took me back to the school and I gave the confession because they said they were going to kill me."
