Disturbing details emerged in court yesterday during the trial of a man accused of raping his seven-year-old niece more than once on the roof of his mother’s house.

The man’s name, names of witnesses and the place where the alleged crime took place have been banned from publication to protect the identity of the victim who is now 17 years old.

The 28-year-old man, who was 17 at the time, would pretend that he wanted the girl to help him clean out the fowls’ coop on the roof of his mother’s house, the court heard.

It was there, in 1998, that he told her to undress, performed a sexual act in front of her, touched her and then had sex with her “not just once but four times”, Nadine Sant, the lawyer from the Attorney General’s Office, told the jurors.

“This was all done when nobody was at home. Imagine the feelings if your own daughter had to tell you this,” she added as the all-male panel listened intently to her opening speech.

The accused threatened to throw the girl off the roof if she said anything to her parents, Dr Sant said.

It was only when the girl started personal and social development lessons at school, when she was around 12 or 13 years old, that she confided in a friend about what had happened to her.

The victim asked a friend to tell the friend’s mother, who then called her own mum to break the news gently.

After that the family – mother, step-father and daughter on one side and accused, brothers and their father on the other – began to feud. The girl’s grandfather stopped speaking to his daughter (the mother) and granddaughter, while his sons (brothers of the accused and of the victim’s mother) began threatening their sister and the girl, Dr Sant said.

Taking the witness stand, Police Superintendent Sharon Tanti said the girl had never changed her version but had at one point retracted her police statement because of the intense threats and pressure from her uncles.

Supt. Tanti said the girl had felt she was the cause of the family break-up and in fact her mother and step-father had even separated for a while because of the fighting.

She described what the girl had told her, giving graphic details of how her uncle had touched her, on one occasion even having sex with her in his bedroom.

The last time that it happened was when he first took her to Ħal Far and forced her to perform oral sex on him. After that she refused to go to her grandmother’s house again, her friend said.

A doctor’s certificate was exhibited in court where the family GP had examined her and found that her hymen had been broken. However, he could not say how because it was so many years later.

Taking the witness stand, the girl’s step-father said he had seen bruises on the girl’s body because one of her uncles had thrown stones at her when she was leaving school in an attempt to scare her into stopping the case.

“We received a lot of threats from her grandfather. One of the uncles even threatened us and he filed police reports against us,” he said.

Lawyer Joe Mifsud appeared for the accused.