Rape trial continues without accused

The trial of a Lithuanian man with an address in Meath accused of raping and falsely imprisoning a Latvian woman has continued in the absence of the accused at the Central Criminal Court today.

Mr Justice Barry White told the jury of nine men and three women that the 38-year-old accused had failed to attend court since Wednesday.

On Wednesday, a number of phone calls were received and there was a suggestion that the accused had been in some form of accident.

However, gardaí confirmed that the accused had not been admitted to any hospital in Dublin or on the route to Meath.

Mr Justice White warned the jury that they should not take any inference against the accused from the fact that he had not appeared as he was still entitled to a presumption of innocence.

The accused denies raping the woman during the night of March 11, 2006.

He also denies falsely imprisoning her and threatening to kill her on the same date at two separate locations in Counties Cavan and Meath.

The woman told defence counsel, Mr Brendan Graham SC (with Ms Miriam Reilly BL) in cross examination, that the button on the jeans she was wearing was torn off by the accused and had not been missing beforehand.

She denied that a safety pin found in the accused's car had been used to hold the jeans together and said that she had worn the pin on the inside of her jeans as a good luck charm.

She said it had been given to her by her grandmother on her last visit home to Latvia according to a common custom where people who travelled away from home were given a pin to keep them safe. She said she recognised the pin because of a slight bend in it.

She agreed with Mr Graham that she had called an interpreter involved in the case to ask her to tell gardaí she wanted to drop the case.

"Everybody around me was saying that nothing was going to happen and I would be the one who was wasting my time," she said.

She said that she had also wanted to drop the case because gardaí were investigating whether she was working as a prostitute and whether she had lots of money.

"It was really painful and embarrassing," she said.

Mr Graham suggested that it would have been impossible to rape someone in the confined space of the car. She replied: "But it happened."

The trial continues on Monday.