UNITED KINGDOM
Premier
Fri 01 Jul 2016
By Aaron James
The Crown Prosecution Service is appealing a decision by a Kosovan court not to extradite a British monk accused of child abuse.
Laurence Soper was arrested and questioned in Italy, where he was living at the time, in 2010 after an alleged victim approached police claiming he had abused him.
He was later released and has not been charged with any crimes.
When British police summoned him again for questioning in 2011 he did not return, sparking what became a five-year Europe-wide manhunt before he was eventually found and arrested in the Kosovan city of Peja earlier this year.
British authorities had requested that he be extradited to the UK, however a Kosovan court blocked the move because under Kosovan law the child abuse allegations against him – some of which date back to the 1970s – had expired.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.