Wings over Scotland | Behind the walls
A continuing exception to this site’s removal is news relating to the scandalous incarceration of journalist and former UK Ambassador Craig Murray, the only human being in the history of planet Earth to be incarcerated for the loosely defined pseudo-crime of “identification. of puzzles ”.
We received another phone call from Craig on HMP Edinburgh yesterday, and he is still in a good mood and being treated well by both staff and fellow inmates. He expressed his great gratitude for the flood of emails sent by Wings readers in response to our appeal a couple of weeks ago; have been receiving up to 60 letters, emails and packages per day, who have been greatly appreciated for helping him spend 22.5 hours out of 24 that he spends alone in his cell.
However, the prison authorities imposed some strange restrictions.
Craig has been unable to respond to many letters because the prison has denied him access to the stamps, with the puzzling reason that he could use them as currency to buy drugs. Books sent to him by many readers were also initially denied, also on drug grounds. (Apparently some people soak the pages in illegal substances and then the prisoner smokes them.)
Fortunately, this latter situation was resolved by a compromise whereby Craig has donated all the books to the prison library and then the library is allowed to lend them to him, presumably because while drug use in prison can be widespread , non-return of the library books would be considered beyond the limits.
With prisoners generally released after serving half their sentence, Craig is now a quarter of the way from his likely incarceration, which means he has three-quarters left. He would be very grateful if people continued to write to him, and now he will also be able to read any book I send him. He apologizes to anyone who has not responded to, through circumstances beyond his control, and hopes that situation will be resolved soon as well.
His direction is:
157095 C Murray
G3 / 34 HM Edinburgh Prison
33 Stenhouse Road
Edinburgh
EH11 3LN
Alternatively, you can send him an email via the Email a prisoner service. This costs 40p per message, but Craig can answer and it’s even possible to make video calls (although Photo attachments are NOT allowed in HMP Edinburgh).
