Irish priest may have faked death to escape sex abuse claims

BRITISH police are still hunting an Irish priest accused of sex abuse, believing he may have faked his own death to avoid extradition.

Fr Christopher Clonan, who worked in a parish in Coventry for 20 years, fled to Dublin and then Australia in 1992 after several altar boys made allegations of abuse against him.

Police were unable to trace him, but in 2000 Fr Clonan’s brother, who lives in the small town of Bendigo, near Melbourne, told them he had died of a brain haemorrhage two years earlier and had been cremated.