A MAN regarded as one of Britain’s most evil killers has broken a near 50-year silence.

Moors Murderer Ian Brady told a mental health tribunal that he is not “psychotic” and should be allowed to return to prison.

But the child-killer refused to directly answer if he would commit suicide in jail if he gets his wish to be transferred from a maximum security hospital.

He compared himself to a monkey in cage being poked with a stick as he said: “You cannot make plans when you have no freedom of control, movement or anything.”

Brady, 75, was speaking in public at length for the first time since he was jailed for life in 1966 as he gave evidence in person to the tribunal at Ashworth Hospital in Merseyside, where he has been held since 1985.

Wearing a dark suit, white shirt and tie and dark glasses, his answers were often unfocused and full of digressions.

His barrister Nathalie Lieven QC asked him directly if he wished to kill himself in prison.

She said: “If you are transferred back to prison, you will try to commit suicide, is that right?”

He replied: “I have been asked the question repeatedly. I have answered hypothetically from all angles.

“In prison you are a monkey in a cage being poked with a stick. How can you pretend to be omnipotent?

“You cannot make plans when you have no freedom of control, movement or anything. As I say, a monkey in a cage being poked by a stick.

“You cannot talk sensibly about anything with a question like that.”

Brady was directly asked why he wanted to leave Ashworth.

He said originally it was a “decent and progressive” regime when it was the “star” of the specialist hospitals such as Broadmoor and Rampton.

But he complained that the regime changed when Ashworth went from being run by the Home Office to being under the control of the NHS.

“Security ruled care,” he said. “Of course, that was not official policy, it was covert.”

He described Ashworth, and the like, now as a “penal warehouse”.

He also reserved scorn for the media and its continued interest in him.

“Why are they still talking about Jack the Ripper, after a century? Because of the dramatic background, the fog, cobbled streets.

“Mine’s the same... Wuthering Heights, Hound Of The Baskervilles.”

He remembered mixing with the Kray twins, the Great Train Robbers and various terrorists.

He laughed as he recalled how the above was recounted in the book Hard Bastards, written by Ronnie Kray’s wife, Kate.

He also alluded to his time as a barber at Wormwood Scrubs in the 1970s when he said he would trim the beards of prison staff and also recalled setting up a Braille unit.

Brady’s legal team say he has a severe narcissistic personality disorder but is not mentally ill and could be treated in prison rather than hospital.

But officials at Ashworth argue that Brady is still chronically mentally ill and remains a paranoid schizophrenic who needs round-the-clock care.

Brady and his partner, Myra Hindley, were convicted of luring children and teenagers to their deaths, with their victims sexually tortured before being buried on Saddleworth Moor, on the Greenfield Road above Holmfirth.

The judgement of the panel will be released at a later date yet to be announced.