An Indian-origin woman, former manager of a post office in UK's England, was wrongly jailed over 12 years ago after being accused of stealing GBP 75,000 from her post office branch in Surrey where she was the sub-postmistress. The woman, Seema Misra, has rejected the apology of an engineer whose evidence helped convict her over faulty accounting software.
Misra, now 47, was imprisoned while she was pregnant and had her conviction quashed in April 2021 as the Court of Appeal ruled that she had been wrongly jailed.
Seema Misra was sent to Bronzefield prison in south-east England and served four-and-a-half months, later giving birth to her second son wearing an electronic tag. Smith told the inquiry that Misra had been used as a "test case" and the success of the case led to more confidence in the faulty Horizon IT accounting system.
At the ongoing public inquiry into the scandal, she told the BBC that the apology of ex-Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins was "too little, too late".
"Nobody can understand it," she was quoted as saying while narrating the ordeal she went through.
Misra said Jenkins could have apologised “ages ago”.
Her reaction followed a written witness statement submitted to the Post Office Inquiry by Jenkins, in which he said: "I did not know that Mrs Misra was pregnant at the time of her conviction and only learned of this many years later... This makes what has happened even more tragic. I can only apologise, again, to Mrs Misra and her family for what happened to her."
The former engineer who appeared as an expert witness in 15 sub-postmaster cases is currently being probed by police for potential perjury or lying to a court. In one of his earlier witness statements to the inquiry, he denied any wrongdoing.
Misra had earlier rejected a similar apology from former Post Office Managing Director David Smith for a congratulatory email he sent after Misra’s conviction. “It was intended to be a congratulatory email to the team, knowing that they had worked hard on the case,” Smith had said in his written evidence to the inquiry.
“However, knowing what I do now, it is evident that my email would have caused Seema Misra and her family substantial distress to read and I would like to apologise for that… Even if this had been a correct conviction, I would absolutely never think that it was ‘brilliant news’ for a pregnant woman to go to prison and I am hugely apologetic that my email can be read as such,” news agency PTI quoted lines from Smith's mail.
“However, seeing this email in the light of what I know now, I understand the anger and the upset that it will have caused and sincerely apologise for that,” he added.
'I Was 8 Weeks Pregnant'
Misra said at the time in April: "I was eight weeks pregnant – they need to apologise to my youngest son. It was terrible. I haven't accepted the apologies," .
"We had my conviction overturned, nobody came at that time to apologise. And now they just suddenly realised that when they have to appear in a public inquiry, they have to apologise," she said.
"How can they do a test on a human being? I'm a living creature. I heard that my case has been used as a test case before. But hearing it again and again, it's just annoying. It makes me more and more angry, to be honest," Misra added.
The UK government, which formally owns Post Office Ltd, has paid out millions in compensation to hundreds of sub-postmasters – many of them of Indian heritage – impacted by the faulty Horizon software.
Earlier this year, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledged action in the historic scandal which wrongly accused sub-postmasters of fraud.
