Mahmoud Hussein Mattan
Mahmoud Hussein Mattan was a father of three who was born in British Somaliland in 1923 and who later moved to Wales to work in a foundry. He faced racial abuse from the community, which led him to separate from his wife because of their treatment as a multiracial couple, although they continued to live on the same street and raise their children together.
On March 6, 1952, a woman named Lily Volpert was found murdered in her shop in the Cardiff Docklands area. Her throat had been cut with a straight razor and £100 had been stolen. Within hours, police questioned Mattan, and ten days later he was charged with murder. A raid of his home found no sign of the money, but a razor and a pair of shoes with specks of blood were discovered.
Mattan’s trial began in July of 1952. The case rested on the testimony of Harold Cover, a Jamaican with a violent past who had been told he would receive a share of the reward in exchange for testimony that led to Mattan’s conviction. At trial, Clover maintained that he had seen Mattan leaving the shop after the murder. But a previous interview had him identifying a man named Taher Gass as the person leaving the shop. The jury was never told of the discrepancies in the testimony. The jury was also not informed that four other witnesses failed to pick Mattan out of a lineup as the man they had seen. One witness, a 12-year-old girl, clearly stated that Mattan was not the man she had seen near the shop at the time of the murder.
The trial was racially charged, with Mattan’s own lawyer calling him “half-child of nature, half semi-civilized savage.” On July 24, 1952, Mattan was found guilty. He was not granted an appeal and on September 3, he was hanged at the prison. His family always maintained his innocence, and they faced racism and discrimination throughout their lives for being related to a murderer.
