One of Britain's most infamous killers, Moors Murderer Ian Brady, on Friday lost his legal bid to be transferred from a psychiatric hospital to a jail.
A mental health tribunal ruled that the 75-year-old - who along with accomplice Myra Hindley tortured and murdered five children in the 1960s - is insane and must stay in his current facility.
“The tribunal has concluded that Mr Ian Stewart Brady continues to suffer from a mental disorder,” said judge Robert Atherton, head of the three-man panel.
He added that it was “necessary for his health and safety and for the protection of other persons” that Brady stayed in hospital.
The ruling followed a week-long hearing at which Brady spoke publicly at length for the first time since 1966, claiming he had faked mental illness so he could be moved from prison to a hospital.
He is now set to remain at the maximum-security Ashworth Hospital, near Liverpool in northwest England, for the foreseeable future.
Brady and Hindley, who were both jailed for life in 1966, buried their victims on the bleak Saddleworth Moor in the Peak District National Park in north-west England.
Their crimes shocked Britain not least because Hindley was a woman, and because neither showed a shred of remorse during the trial.
Hindley died in custody in hospital in 2002 aged 60, while Brady was held in various prisons before being transferred to Ashworth Hospital in 1985 after he was diagnosed as being a paranoid schizophrenic.
He told the mental health tribunal that he was not insane, merely a “petty criminal”, and described the killings as “recreational”.
He said he had used “method acting” to convince authorities he was mentally ill, but now wanted to be transferred to a prison because the hospital had the atmosphere of a “penal warehouse”.
He suggested that if he was allowed to go back to jail he would be “free to end his own life” by starving himself to death.
Brady has supposedly been on hunger strike since 1999, but a nurse told the tribunal that he made himself toast every morning.
His legal team argued that he was not mentally ill despite having a severe personality disorder.
Families of the victims have criticised the decision to give Brady the chance to “grandstand” at the mental health tribunal.
The hearing was the first time he has been seen in public since the 1980s, when he was taken back to the moor to assist police in the search for the bodies of two of his victims. - AFP