ITV will screen confession by Krays' hitman

Bosses at ITV have decided to allow a murderer to appear on television talking about a killing he says he committed for Reggie and Ronnie Kray in 1966.

Bosses at ITV have decided to allow a murderer to appear on television talking about a killing he says he committed for Reggie and Ronnie Kray in 1966.

The Krays - Unfinished Business will be shown on 10 January and will feature the gangland hitman Freddie Foreman describing the night he shot Frank Mitchell for the Krays.

Foreman, with the Krays, was acquitted of the murder of Mitchell after a judge ruled that the evidence of another gangster, Albert Donaghue, was inadmissable. Donaghue had told the court how Foreman described hacking up the body.

In 1996, Foreman confessed to Mitchell's killing in his autobiography, Respect: the managing director of British crime , written while he was in prison. Unfinished Business tells the story of Mitchell, a giant of a man who was certified "mentally defective". He spent time at Rampton and Broadmoor hospitals and then Dartmoor jail - but had a history of escaping and terrorising people and became known in the tabloids as "the mad axeman".

In 1966, the Kray twins helped to hide Mitchell when he escaped from Dartmoor, and then negotiated his return to jail in exchange for parole. But Mitchell refused to go back, and Reggie Kray called on Foreman to help get him off his hands.

In previous interviews, Foreman has shown no sign of repentance. He does, however, give some useful information to those researching the killings of gangsters such as Mitchell, Tommy "Ginger" Marks and Jack "the Hat" McVitie. Contrary to public belief, they were not buried in motorway flyover concrete, he says, but at sea.

* The Moors murderer Ian Brady had tests at Fazakerley Hospital, Liverpool, yesterday after collapsing at Ashworth high-security hospital where he has been on hunger strike for almost three months. Brady, 61, was jailed for life in 1966 for killing three children. A spokeswoman for Ashworth said the tests showed "no cause for concern".