At least 13 may have killed themselves over UK’s Post Office wrongful convictions scandal

LONDON (AP) – At least 13 people were thought to have taken their own lives as a result of Britain’s Post Office scandal, in which almost 1,000 postal employees were wrongly prosecuted or convicted of criminal wrongdoing because of a faulty computer system, a report said Tuesday.

Another 59 people contemplated suicide over the scandal, one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in U.K. history.

From around 1999 to 2015, hundreds of people who worked at Post Office branches were wrongly convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting, with some imprisoned and others forced into bankruptcy. Some lost their homes, while others suffered health problems or breakdowns in their relationships or became ostracized by their communities.

Retired judge Wyn Williams, who chairs a public inquiry into the scandal, said in a report published Tuesday that 13 people killed themselves as a consequence of a faulty Post Office accounting system “showing an illusory shortfall in branch accounts,” according to their families.

The problems at the Post Office, which is state-owned but operates as a private business, were known for years. But the full scale of the injustice didn’t become widely known until last year, when a TV docudrama propelled the scandal to national headlines and galvanized support for victims.

The culprit was software called Horizon, which the Post Office introduced 25 years ago across branches to automate sales accounting. When the software showed false account shortfalls, the Post Office accused branch managers of dishonesty and obliged them to repay the money.

In all, the report said that about 1,000 people were prosecuted and convicted based on evidence from the faulty system. The government has since introduced legislation to reverse the convictions and compensate the victims.

Jo Hamilton, a former Post Office manager and a lead campaigner, said that the report “shows the full scale of the horror that they unleashed on us.”

Tuesday’s report was the first to be published from the inquiry, which is expected to issue a further report at a later date that will potentially attribute blame.