Ian Brady hits out at tribunal decision

Last month, the serial killer lost his legal bid to be transferred to a prison and was told he will instead remain a patient at Ashworth Hospital on Merseyside for the foreseeable future on the grounds that he is mentally insane.

He had reportedly wanted to move to a Scottish prison where he would not be force fed.

In reaction to the decision, Brady wrote a 700-word letter to Channel 5 News in which he criticised the decision of the mental health tribunal, the witnesses who gave evidence and the public money spent on it.

He said: “£250,000 wasted by Ashworth medical mediocrities manipulating a politically motivated tribunal… designed to distract public attention from the lack of reasoned argument and pertinent evidence.”

Brady, who has long-term paranoid schizophrenia, also criticised the health professionals who gave evidence at the tribunal.

“The pathetic petty abuse… rubber-stamp witnesses employed to smear, discredit and distract, revealed more about Ashworth’s collective culture of applied ignorance and malice than it did about me,” he wrote. “Those listening in the real world would have doubted their senses.”

Speaking to Channel 5 News, Terry Kilbride, brother of John Kilbride who was 13 when he was strangled and buried by Brady and his accomplice Myra Hindley, said: “He shows how twisted he is… in letters that he writes and the way he speaks, like he spoke at the tribunal – not answering the questions.

“He wants to be there again -–in the public eye, saying ‘It’s all been a fix’ so he can have an appeal and do it all again and waste another £250,000.”

The tribunal was the first time Brady had been seen in public since the 1980s, when he was taken back to Saddleworth Moor in a search for the bodies of two of his victims.

It was the first time he had spoken in public since being jailed for life at Chester Assizes in 1966.