Alan Turing's family to deliver petition demanding 49,000 British homosexuals be pardoned

LONDON, Feb. 22 (UPI) -- Alan Turing's family is supporting a petition to demand the British government pardon 49,000 gay men who were deemed criminals for breaking "gross indecency" laws.

Alan Turing was a British computer scientist, mathematician and cryptanalyst who helped break the codes the Germans were using to communicate during World War II, and he played a major role in creating the building blocks for the computer.

Turing was a homosexual who was forced to undergo chemical castration when the British government ruled his sexual orientation broke the gross indecency laws. He was pardoned posthumously in 2013.

His life story is the basis of the Oscar-nominated film, The Imitation Game.

The petition has received over 500,000 signatures, and Rachel Barnes, Turing's great niece, will deliver the petition to the office of the prime minister on Monday.

"It is so unfair and so unjust that the other 49,000 of men have been forgotten," she told Channel 4 News.

The gross indecency law was repealed by England and Wales in 1967 -- 13 years after Turing committed suicide.