Following the IRA killing of a Royal Irish Constabulary sergeant outside Bandon church in July 1920, Percival captured Tom Hales, commander of the IRA's 3rd Cork Brigade, and Patrick Harte, the brigade's quartermaster, for which he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). Both prisoners later claimed to have been repeatedly beaten and tortured while in custody. Hales alleged that a pair of pliers had been used on his lower body and to extract his fingernails. Harte suffered brain injury and died in a mental hospital in 1925. Ormonde Winter, the head of British Intelligence in Dublin Castle, later named Hales as an informer who had invented the story as an excuse for providing the names of his fellow IRA members in return for a lesser sentence.