know what happened. What should happen is that people should be compensated so they can begin to forgive the British government.” Mara said: “I’m very happy and my heart is clean.” Asked what she would tell her four children, she said simply: “I will tell them I won.” McCombe said in 2011 that there was “ample evidence … that there may have been systematic torture of detainees ”. On Friday he ruled that a fair trial was possible, and highlighted the fact that thousands of documents came to light in 2011 after the Foreign Office admitted to a secret archive of colonial-era files. During the course of their attempts to have the claims struck out – efforts that the claimants’ lawyer, Martyn Day, described as “morally repugnant” – the British government’s lawyers accepted that all three of the elderly Kenyans were tortured by the colonial authorities. Day said: “The British government has admitted that these three Kenyans were brutally tortured by the British colony and yet they have been hiding behind technical legal defences for three years in order to avoid any legal responsibility. There will undoubtedly be victims of colonial torture from Malaya to the Yemen, from Cyprus to Palestine, who will be reading this judgment with great care.” Among those who are known to have been watching the case closely are a number of veterans of the Eoka