London, May 13 (IANS) An eight-year-old British girl tightly clutched a teddy bear as she told a court here about how she was lured and allegedly raped by two 10-year-old boys.
The girl said she was attacked after the boys took her to a field and a bin shed beside a block of flats.
Daily Express reported Thursday that the girl was given the toy to hold during an interview that was filmed and played at the Old Bailey court.
The boys deny the rape charge. They are among the youngest in Britain to be charged with rape.
The girl held an usher’s hand and was lifted into a chair. She was connected through a video link. The judge then gently asked her to take a juice bottle away from her mouth so he could hear her.
She then sat as her interviews were played to the jury.
The jury was told how the girl was playing with her younger sister near her home in October last year when the boys took her away.
The incident took place in Hayes, Middlesex.
The girl later told her mother she had been taken to some flats before being led to the field where she was allegedly raped, prosecutor Rosina Cottage said.
She later went to hospital complaining of stomach pains.
‘This case concerns rape by two boys still at primary school of a girl even younger. Together they took her to different locations near where they lived in order to find a sufficiently secluded spot to assault her,’ Cottage was quoted as saying.
The victim recalled how her scooter was thrown into a bush.
‘They said if I didn’t pull down my pants, they wouldn’t get my scooter from the bush,’ she said.
Former Bush official says he was asked to raise threat level before 2004 polls
Washington, Aug.21 (ANI): The first secretary of homeland security, Tom Ridge, has asserted in a new book that he was pressured by top advisers to President George W. Bush to raise the national threat level just before the 2004 election in what he suspected was an effort to influence the vote.
Ridge said Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed him to elevate the public threat posture but he refused.
According to the New York Times, Ridge now calls it a “dramatic and inconceivable” event that “proved most troublesome” and reinforced his decision to resign.
The provocative allegation provides fresh ammunition for critics who have accused the Bush administration of politicizing national security.
Keith M. Urbahn, a spokesman for Rumsfeld, said the defense secretary supported letting the public know if intelligence agencies believed there was a greater threat, and pointed to a variety of chilling Qaeda warnings in those days, including one tape vowing that “the streets of America will run red with blood.”
Ashcroft could not be reached for comment. But Mark Corallo, who was his spokesman at the Justice Department, dismissed Ridge’s account.
“Didn’t happen,” he said. “Now, would be a good time for Mr. Ridge to use his emergency duct tape.”
Ridge’s book, called “The Test of Our Times” and due out September 1 from Thomas Dunne Books, is the latest by a Bush adviser to disclose internal disagreements and establish distance from an unpopular administration.
In the book, Ridge complains that he was never invited to National Security Council meetings, that Rumsfeld would rarely meet with him and that the White House pressured him to include a justification for the Iraq war in a speech. (ANI)