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Prisoners and prison staff at Her Majesty’s Prison Edinburgh in Scotland, or Saughton Prison, faced a serious outbreak of COVID-19 at a time when inmates were explicitly discouraged from requesting COVID tests, according to diplomat-turned whistleblower Craig Murray.
“There was a major COVID outbreak in the prison in the last 6 weeks of my incarceration,” Murray recalled. While COVID was present in the prison throughout his stay there, Murray said that between October 20 and November 20, “there were more than 200 positive tests for COVID in the jail.”
“That’s 200 out of a population of 900,” he added, emphasizing that all of these prisoners would have been symptomatic. (Prisoners who weren’t symptomatic were not tested.)
While the Scottish government urged the entire population to test themselves with lateral flow tests more than twice a week, whether they had symptoms or not, it was difficult for prisoners to get a test.
On December 1, one day after his release from prison, Murray spoke in an exclusive interview to The Dissenter. He was the first journalist to be imprisoned for media contempt of court in Scotland in over 70 years, according to his defense team.
His conviction stemmed from his coverage of the sex assault trial of former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond. Murray, a longtime supporter of Scottish independence,...
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