Campaign to free Marine A Al Blackman, jailed for murdering a Taliban insurgent in Afghanistan

Sgt Alexander Blackman - known as Marine A throughout his court martial - was originally jailed for a minimum of ten years, later reduced to eight, meaning he could have to wait until at least 2021 to be freed.

But his family, friends and thousands of supporters across the country are working tirelessly to get his conviction, which they regard as a miscarriage of justice, quashed so he can get out earlier.

The County Gazette looks at the background to what is surely the most talked about case in recent years and speaks to Blackman's wife about the tireless efforts to win his freedom.

*AL Blackman and his wife Claire were relaxing at home chatting about moving out of town to live the good life in the countryside when there was a knock on the door that would change their lives forever.

He was confused rather than worried as the military policeman told him he was being taken in for questioning at Taunton Police Station, barely a mile up the road.

There, he answered their questions about four apparently harmless video clips he never even knew existed of some of the fierce action during his tour of Afghanistan.

He was then allowed home, convinced that would be the end of it - but how wrong he proved to be.

He was re-arrested and this time informed there was a fifth, incriminating video clip that would lead to him being locked up after one of the most controversial rulings in modern military history.

The footage showed Sgt Blackman, as he was at the time before being discharged and stripped of his rank, 'executing' a badly wounded Taliban fighter in Helmand province in September 2011.

As Blackman shot the insurgent in the chest, he told him: "Shuffle off this mortal coil" before turning to his colleagues and saying: "Obviously this doesn't go anywhere, fellas...I've just broken the Geneva Convention."

That was enough for Blackman to be told he was to go before a military court charged with murder.

Looking back today, Mrs Blackman recalls the shock when his legal team announced he was heading for a court martial.

She said: "It's hard to think about it even now. The legal team was advising us it was unlikely to come to anything and we expected the charges to be dropped.

"We didn't want to be complacent. We understood the gravity of it, but we were told we had a strong case. It was a big surprise when Al was convicted."

Over the coming weeks, they carried on with their lives as normally as they could - he continued his job as a Commando, teaching recruits how to fire live rounds at Lympstone, in Devon, she as a marketing manager in the NHS, even enjoying taking part in a weekly pub quiz in the town.

"We didn't tell anyone about the pending case," said Mrs Blackman.

"We thought that if it was all going away, we wanted Al's reputation to remain in tact.

"When he was convicted, we half expected our friends to be upset we hadn't confided in them, but they've been fantastic."

The emergence of the video clips two years after the incident came about through the most bizarre of circumstances.

Blackman had always told his men not to wear helmet cameras, but a new member of the troop ignored the rule and recorded what was a ferocious firefight.

He actually deleted the fifth clip and shared the other four with his fellow Commandos - and that would have been the end of the matter but for one of the Marines getting caught up in a messy divorce a year after they returned to the UK.

His wife reported him to police over some unrelated material on his laptop, which was seized, leading to the discovery of the four clips, while the fifth, which was to secure Blackman's conviction, was retrieved at a later date.

Mrs Blackman said: "You can hold grudges, but all that does is make you bitter.

"Al has no ill feelings towards any of the lads. They were part of his troop and he made a mistake. He's admitted that."

Since his conviction, thousands of people from all over the country and far flung parts of the world have voiced their outrage that one of our troops should be locked up for killing an enemy on the battlefield.

Blackman admits what he did was wrong, but his actions have to be taken in the context of the fight raging around him.

He maintained at his trial that his victim was already dead and what he did was brought on by post traumatic stress on what was a harrowing tour of Afghanistan fighting a merciless Taliban enemy, who stooped to hanging body parts of British troops they had killed in trees.

A petition signed by over 100,000 people, many of whom feel Blackman was a political scapegoat who had been hung out to dry, sparked a debate in Parliament with support from all the MPs that attended, including Rebecca Pow, MP for Taunton.

Last month a crowd of 2,700 gathered in Parliament Square (below) in a show of mass support for him.

Blackman, who is behind bars at HMP Erlestoke, in Wiltshire, is currently awaiting the response of the Criminal Case Review Commission to a request to have the case looked at again.

A total of seven ring binders have been presented as evidence and a psychiatrist has examined him to see if he was suffering from PTSD, but the slowness of the wheels of justice is proving frustrating.

Mrs Blackman said: "There's no indication of timescales.

"All we can do is sit and be patient and hope they make the right decision.

"Al admits what he did was wrong, but in terms of the circumstances, it's just not morally right to charge him with murder in the civilian sense when he was doing the job his country sent him to do.

"You can't send them off to do a job, then bring them home and prosecute them. It's morally wrong.

"Al hasn't got an evil bone in his body.

"He was in a situation where he was responsible for the lives of eight or nine other lads. He takes that responsibility incredibly seriously.

"They were in a war situation where it was them or us. Anybody in that situation is going to do their best to make sure they come home alive."