Locked up in a Thai jail for a murder he says he didn't commit, Colin Martinhas TB and spent almost two years of his sentence in leg-irons.Paul Cullen reports
It was to be a new start, a chance for laid-off shipyard workers to get off the dole and find lucrative work halfway around the world.
Welders, riggers and electricians from Belfast, Merseyside and Scotland flocked to Colin Martin's dream offer of £4,000 a month tax-free contracts on a barge in Guam. Martin's one-man employment agency in the Netherlands recruited the workers on behalf of a company called the Offshore Corporation of Bangkok.
Yet within a few years the dream had turned to farce and then tragedy. The Offshore Corporation was bogus. Almost 30 ex-shipyard workers were swindled out of their life's savings, and Martin was jailed for 13 years in Thailand for killing a New Zealander linked to the Offshore Corporation.
Today, over four years after he was jailed, Martin, who was born in Birkenhead and spent five years growing up in Ireland, languishes in prison in Bangkok. He has TB, suffers from depression and has lost 25kg in weight. He spent the first two years shackled in leg-irons.
Martin (40) claims he was tortured by Thai police, who forced him to sign a statement confessing to the murder of New Zealander Brett Holdsworth in 1997. He says police punched him, attached electrodes to his body and placed a plastic bag over his head. His lawyer failed to turn up at his trial.
Yet in spite of numerous court appearances, his repeated requests for an appeal have been ignored.
The shipyard workers recruited by Martin paid him an "integrity bond" of £8,000 each before flying out to the Far East. But when they got to Thailand and the Philippines, they discovered that there were no jobs and no company called Offshore Corporation.
Their money was gone, and so were the people behind the company, including Holdsworth and another New Zealander, Gerry O'Connor, who has been described by a British MP as "a well-known con man".
The workers accused Martin of involvement in the swindle, but he claimed he had also been defrauded. He returned with one of the men to Bangkok and reported O'Connor's activities to the police.
Martin stayed in Thailand where he could avoid his angry clients and at the same time track down O'Connor and his cronies. In July 1997, he caught up with the New Zealanders. A violent confrontation took place, and Holdsworth was stabbed to death.
Since his arrest he has endured appalling conditions in Thai prisons. At one stage he shared a cell with 37 prisoners. The room had one open toilet, and the lights were never switched off.
After contracting TB, he was moved to the hospital wing of Bangkok prison, where he got a bed for the first time in three years.
The Irish Commission for Prisoners Overseas says Martin's plight is "scandalous". "Aside from the horrendous overcrowding and the unhygienic conditions, his wait for an appeal has stretched beyond any reasonable bounds," says the co-ordinator, Ms Nuala Kelly.
An Irish nun in Bangkok visits Martin on behalf of the commission. Support has also come from Mr John Mulcahy, publisher of Phoenix magazine, who became aware of Martin's case while on a visit to Thailand. Yet apart from these interventions, his case has attracted little attention.
Part of the problem is there is no Irish embassy in Thailand. His case is handled from the embassy in Malaysia, which has been affected by changes of staff. A spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs says the Minister, Mr Cowen, has written to the Thai authorities on Martin's behalf.
His brother, Tommy, says the Government hasn't pursued the case with sufficient vigour. "They haven't done enough, not just for Colin but for other prisoners in his position."