Moors murderer Ian Brady has told the BBC he envies his former partner in crime Myra Hindley, who is recovering after treatment for a potentially fatal brain condition.

Brady said Hindley was "lucky" to be suffering from a life-threatening illness, and that in her position he would refuse all medical treatment.

In a letter to the corporation, Brady said: "I see in the news that Myra has struck lucky with some sort of potentially fatal brain condition.

"For years here I've been wishing for any sort of cancer, the perfect deus ex machina, as I would refuse all surgery."

Hindley, 57, is recovering at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, from surgery on a cerebral aneurism, a swollen artery at the base of the brain.

Sudden ruptures of the artery can lead to fatal blood loss or severe brain damage.

Brady, 62, is a patient at Ashworth high-security psychiatric hospital on Merseyside, and is fighting a legal battle for the right to end his life.

Staff at the hospital have been force-feeding him for nearly three months, after he went on hunger strike in protest at being moved to a new ward.

Last month Brady collapsed and was taken from Ashworth to an outside hospital for tests.

"I recall nothing, except subsequent flashes of scenes," he wrote in his letter.

"Lying on a trolley in a strange hospital room handcuffed to two prison warders; a forest of police in checkered caps crowding the room...my predominant sense being depression at being alive.

"The outside hospital wanted a brain scan. For legal purposes I've agreed...so I might strike lucky as well."

Brady said that on New Year's Eve he was told by other patients at Ashworth that a friend on his former ward had died.

"Every patient who gave me news of the death added the same rider - he's better off now, out of this dump," he wrote.

"In short, apart from the subnormals, patients here envy the dead."

Brady said that after 15 years in the hospital he had been placed in a ward for patients with "personality disorders" for political reasons.

"So my present course is logical, pragmatic and unqualified," he says.

"I would rather be dead than under such a regime. After 35 years, to reach this abysmal quality of life, to me the whole game is over."

Brady has bombarded government ministers and opposition MPs with documents setting out his complaints against the hospital.

He has also instructed his lawyers to go to court to challenge the hospital's right to force-feed him.

In a letter to the Home Office minister Paul Boateng, he has written: "Ashworth is a penal dustbin and is therefore the responsibility of the Prison Department, as is the fact that I am being illegally force-fed in my present four-month hunger and thirst strike to the death.

"I realise of course that the UK is a long-term holder of the European record for contravention of human and civil rights.

"Consideration is reserved for Nazi war criminals and Chilean dictators, rather than prisoners whose sole aim is permission to die.

"I have no doubt the public, who fully support my right to die, will take a contrary view."

Former lovers Hindley and Brady were given life sentences in May 1966 for the murders of 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey and 17-year-old Edward Evans.

Brady was also convicted of murdering 12-year-old John Kilbride.

In 1987 the pair confessed to the killings of Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12.