The 22-year-old who emerged from Thorn Croft young offenders’ institution on September 9 2009 was virtually unrecognisable. Only his pronounced Liverpool accent was unchanged. Hollow-cheeked, lantern-jawed and pencil-thin, he was about 60 pounds lighter than the teenager jailed four years earlier. 

Perhaps his "fitness" was due to meagre prison rations or his booze-free diet, first in Bulgaria and then in the UK. Or was it simply nervous exhaustion? The teenager who’d been arrested in 2005 was bloated, heavy-jowled and round-faced with a distinctive paunch. Back in 2005 he looked like any young football fan after a few nights out on the town and perhaps that was ultimately Michael Shields’ downfall.    

Shields appeared uncomfortable in the media spotlight. In one of his first interviews after his release he said he wanted to return to having "a normal life", although judging from the press attention – his reception, for example, at the September 12 Liverpool match against Burnley – and the impending publication of his autobiography, that may prove a tall order. "Today is a happy day for me but one of mixed emotions too. I am a free man, yes, but it should not have come to this," he said, adding that his long prison ordeal had been "a living hell". In an interview with ITN, Shields said he refused to give in to bitterness about his lost years inside. "If I don’t think about it, don’t dwell on it, just look forward then it’ll never eat me up, I’ll be alright," he said.

Yes, Shields was now a free man, although bitter that, in his view, he had been failed by two countries’ justice systems. In the words of UK justice secretary Jack Straw, Shields now had "a clean slate". Yet much to his disappointment, many in Bulgaria – including former foreign minister Ivailo Kalfin – expressed doubt. "It was a very high profile case. It attracted a lot of public attention and I’m afraid we’re giving a very bad signal to football hooligans," said Kalfin. 

Sadly for Shields, his royal pardon also came towards the end of his sentence. In his own words, he’d "given up hope anyway", and had decided to bide his time until his release in May 2010. After all, although the case against him was circumstantial at best, even though he had passed a lie detector test with "flying colours" and even though Merseyside police had been invited by Straw to examine the case surrounding Shields, the justice secretary had refused him a royal pardon in July. 

So Shields seemed reconciled to spending the next eight months behind bars. "I’d been in far worse places – being chained to a radiator in a Bulgarian police station for 24 hours springs to mind. Or a prison in Varna, on the Black Sea coast, where cockroaches crawled over my face most nights as I slept," Shields wrote in an account of "his week" for the UK’s Observer newspaper, referring to the relatively lax conditions at Thorn Croft.

Fateful night
Shields’ Bulgarian "odyssey" began in 2005. He and other Liverpool fans had watched their team win the Champions League final in Istanbul.

On the night of May 30, Shields was in the Black Sea resort of Varna when a Bulgarian barman, Martin Georgiev, was viciously attacked with a paving slab. 

A witness apparently described Georgiev’s attacker as wearing a "white sports top". Another witness, a British holidaymaker who had befriended Georgiev during that evening, pointed police in the direction of the Kristal hotel. Police arrived at the hotel and then knocked on Shields’ door, woke him, made him put on a white T-shirt, and drove him to the scene of the crime where he was kept sitting in the car for 30 minutes in view of witnesses who were still being questioned by police.

Although Shields had no previous criminal record, he was handcuffed to a radiator in the police station and placed in three identification parades with just three other men. Only one witness positively identified him.

Georgiev had not been able to provide police with a good description of his attacker but the media published pictures of Shields’ face before the trial, and he was then identified by other witnesses while in the dock, although they had not previously viewed a parade.

Police eventually arrested three other Liverpool supporters who were unknown to Shields and his friends: Bradley Thompson, Graham Sankey and Anthony Wilson.