Man in Hong Kong walks free after daughter admits making up rape allegations against him

HONG KONG — A man accused of repeatedly molesting and raping his teenage daughter walked free from a Hong Kong court on Wednesday (Jan 23), two days after the girl admitted making up the allegations to frame him.

The 15-year-old told Hong Kong’s High Court she had lied out of anger over the father’s favouritism towards her brother, going as far as faking medical evidence. The man had spent 15 months in jail.

Last week the father was portrayed in the prosecution’s opening speech as someone who had forced himself on his daughter at least seven times between 2015 and 2017. He would threaten to commit suicide if his daughter told anyone, they added.

A medical examination immediately after the most recent alleged attack found traces of his semen in the then 14-year-old’s genitals.

Both father and daughter cannot be named to protect their identities.

But the accusations collapsed on Monday when the girl took the witness box to give an account completely different from what she told police during their investigation.

She told the jury she had fabricated incidents to frame her father, 42, because he always favoured her younger brother over her.

She had inserted the semen into her genitals herself, having found it on a used tissue, she said.

On Wednesday Madam Justice Anthea Pang Po-kam ordered the seven-member jury to return a not-guilty verdict because, without the girl’s testimony, there was not enough evidence.

The father, a bus driver, remained calm in the dock despite learning he had been acquitted on five counts of indecent assault and two of rape.

It was not clear whether the man, who had been in jail since allegations surfaced in mid-October 2017, would return home.

Before freeing him, Justice Pang asked prosecutors to look into whether a protection order would be needed for the girl, whom she noted appeared not to have a “harmonious” relationship with her family.

A police source said it would be normal protocol to look into the change of the girl’s testimony.

The testimony stood in such stark contrast to her earlier interview, the source said, that investigators were surprised to hear about it for the first time.

During the interview, the girl said she was first molested by her father in their flat when she was 12. She claimed he rubbed his genitals against hers, after removing her underwear.

Similar assaults ensued, she claimed, on one occasion with her brother in the same room. At one point the father started offering her money, from HK$50 (S$8.67) to HK$100, she alleged.

She claimed the first rape took place in 2016.

She said her father implied the family would lose its breadwinner and that he would throw himself out of the window or get arrested, if she ever told others. SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST