A 46-year-old deputy nursing officer at Mount Carmel hospital has been jailed for four years after he was found guilty of raping a 17-year-old cleaner inside a fertiliser tank at his field in Attard four years ago.

In graphic testimony, the young woman said this was the second time she had been raped, the first having happened during a village festa when she was grabbed by a 22-year-old man and taken into a dark alleyway.

Taking the witness stand, she recounted how Paul Vassallo, from Kalkara, had asked her to clean a fertiliser tank against payment after she had previously gone with her boyfriend to the same field and picked grapes for him.

On September 24, 2007, he picked her up from her house and the two of them made their way to the field and walked into a small room where they drank some of his homemade wine.

She said she took two glasses but she downed the wine too fast and felt unwell. She asked to lie down for a while, which she did on a bed in the same room.

Mr Vassallo tried to kiss her on the lips but she refused, she said.

Once she had recovered, they both went to clean the tank and she changed from jeans into a pair of his boxer shorts because she was not dressed appropriately for the job. Moments later he jumped into the tank wearing only his boxer shorts and, lifting up her top and pulling down her shorts, forced her down onto him. The sex lasted only a few seconds, she said.

She was trying to get up and struggling because her feet kept slipping on the water in the tank that was mixed with soap and fertiliser. She refused to have any sexual contact with him, she said.

When the ordeal was over and she had managed to get up she leaned against the wall of the tank and burst out crying. She then continued to wash the tank, after which she put the shorts back on and he jumped out of the tank naked.

She then smoked a cigarette and he asked her to go back to the room to have sex again but she refused.

They got into his car and, for the third time, he asked her to have sex with him but she refused again and he took her back home.

She filed a police report the following day.

In his version, Mr Vassallo denied having sex, claiming he was not able to, but admitted groping her.

Mr Vassallo said it was she who had seduced him and that when he picked her up she was wearing clothes that she would normally wear for a night on the town. In fact she told him that she had come from Paceville and hadn’t bothered changing.

At the field, he said, she was seducing him with talk of her sexual encounters with her boyfriends. She stripped off, put on a pair of his boxer shorts and got into the tank. She asked him to look inside to see if she was doing a good job.

She was wearing practically nothing, he said. He got into the tank and groped her but it stopped there.

Magistrate Jacqueline Padovani said she did not find Mr Vassallo to be a credible witness, especially because of the discrepancies between the statement he gave to the police and his earlier testimony in court.

He had first told the police that he asked her to have sex with him and then groped her and asked her a second time. However, he later changed his version, saying she had touched him first.

The magistrate said his declaration that he never thought that he would get tempted by her was contradictory when he had given a long description of what she was wearing, which exhibited a sexual obsession with her.

Although the victim had smoked a cigarette and continued to wash the tank, this was typical of a “defensive and coping mechanism” where victims of trauma act in a “catatonic and robotic way”.

She found Mr Vassallo guilty of raping the girl and offending public morals because the act happened in a public place.