A British teenager who admitted the rape of a 12-year-old girl he met on Facebook walked free from court yesterday.

Junaid Bhuta, 19, from Frenchwood, Preston, contacted the girl through a friends request on the social networking website in April last year.

She replied "Thanks for the request. Who is this?" and the pair began talking on the phone, Manchester's Minshull Street Crown Court heard.

But the girl lied that she was 16 and on the third occasion they met face to face they went to a park in Preston and had sex, in which she was a "willing participant", the court was told.

Mr Bhuta, a student who wants to go to university to study law, pleaded guilty to statutory rape of a girl under 13 on March 6, on the basis that he believed she was 16 and had a "reasonable belief" that was her true age.

The girl put on her Facebook profile that she was leaving school this year to support her claim to be 16, but Judge Timothy Mort, passing sentence, said the defendant should have made more inquiries.

He said: "It doesn't seem to me to be fair to call you a predator or you groomed her.

"I think it is right to say she could pass for a 16-year-old and able to speak relatively maturely."

Mr Bhuta was sentenced to six months imprisonment, suspended for 18 months, and ordered to sign the sex offenders register for seven years.

Andrew Evans, prosecuting, told the court that after they had sex in the park, the pair went on a "date" to the cinema later the same day then Mr Bhuta accompanied her for part of the journey home.

The court heard that the defendant bought her train ticket home - an adult ticket, which again showed he thought she was 16.

The girl was late home and her mother had called. When she arrived, she confessed to her mother what had happened.

She told police she wanted to lose her virginity to her husband on her honeymoon, "not some damp, wooded area in the middle of a park with a person I met on Facebook".

James Palfrey, mitigating, said: "This is a case which is particularly unique in its facts.

"He is not by any means a sexual predator. He had been perhaps mischievously but deliberately misled, deceived by the complainant as to her age and actual identity. "Had the defendant known her real age, we simply would not be here today."

He said the girl was "socially and emotionally older than her years", and the defendant had paid a heavy price for his error.