A 36-year-old man has been cleared of sexually abusing his stepbrother after a court heard there were too many unanswered questions in the case.
Magistrate Audrey Demicoli noted that the allegations surfaced 10 years after the abuse was meant to have happened.
They emerged when the father of the accused and the boy’s mother were going through messy separation proceedings.
As a result, the accused had been charged with defilement, violent indecent assault and holding the boy against his will in 2001.
He had also been accused of harassing the father of two young boys in 2006.
The magistrate noted that the alleged victim, who by the time he had testified was 20 years old, had used very simple, child-like terms to describe what had happened to him when a man his age should have known the appropriate words to use.
Furthermore, the alleged victim was inconsistent in his version of events, first saying the abuse happened when he was aged between nine and 15 and then saying he had been much younger.
It also resulted that the accused was not living with his father at the time but was in a home.
He had used very simple, child-like terms to describe what happened
The accused managed to prove that the allegations were made out of spite because there was a lot of pique between the separating couple.
With regard to the allegations of harassment, the court heard that the accused had phoned the mother of two children who used to play football at a Mosta club and tried to get them to transfer to at a club in Floriana, saying one of them was very promising.
The woman informed her husband who, in turn, phoned the accused and questioned him.
When the father phoned a friend at the Floriana football club in question, he was told to be careful of the man because children had problems with the accused in the past.
Sometime later, the children’s father spotted the accused outside their house and asked him what he was doing there and the accused replied it had nothing to do with him.
He later said he was there to buy a car. Then, when testifying, the accused said he had stopped there by coincidence while shopping because the shops closed between 2pm and 4pm and he decided to wait.
Magistrate Demicoli acquitted the 36-year-old of harassment because he was charged with committing the crime a number of times when this was a one-off incident.