'When they led me to my prison cell I thought I'd died' — ordeal of Hampstead postmaster jailed in scandal
Former Post Office manager Kamran Ashraf, 46, and his former sub-postmistress wife Siema Kamran, 48, bought the Hampstead Heath Post Office between 2001 and 2003. They felt forced to plead guilty to theft when £25,000 went missing from their Post Office, despite being innocent, and he was sentenced to nine months in jail in 2004. The father-of-three spent 10 weeks behind bars and eventually had his conviction overturned in 2020, receiving more than £200,000 in compensation so far. He now works for the Department for Work and Pensions and has been diagnosed with severe PTSD. The couple are still yet to receive full compensation for the mental toll, his time in prison and other losses.
There's a memory I often think back to, before this whole Post Office nightmare started. It was 2001 and my wife Siema and I were in our twenties with two young children and had just bought the local Post Office on South End Road in Hampstead. We had everything we wanted — kids, a business of our own — and it felt like everything would continue to go according to plan, as long as we were honest people and worked hard. We were in bed one night and and said 'I really hope this bubble doesn't burst'.
We must have jinxed it that night, because boy did that bubble burst. Less than two years after that comment, everything started to go wrong when we were told we'd somehow racked up a shortfall of £25,000 at our Post Office. Like so many other sub-postmasters and postmistresses across the country, the 20 years since have been a hellish rollercoaster of being separated while I was sent to jail, losing our family home and having to beg our parents for enough food to feed our children, as you'll probably be aware of if you've watched ITV's powerful new drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which tells the story of others who went through similar nightmares to us.
We watched the four-part drama from our home in Winchmore Hill on the night it was televised last week. We're on a big WhatsApp group with 40 or so of the other victims these days — we've become one big family — and everyone was feeling more or less the same in the build-up to the show: looking forward to it, but also dreading it in equal measure, because there's so much emotion and suffering behind these stories. We were worried it would be triggering to see our lives played
