A German court sentenced a 68-year-old man to 3½ half years in prison yesterday for sexually abusing a six-year-old girl from Co Offaly in 1985.
However, Andreas Lewicki was released immediately after the verdict was read out because he already has been in jail for six years for sex abuse. He is to pay €12,500 in damages to his victim, now 23, who gave evidence.
A regional court in Ulm, near Stuttgart, heard how the girl's two aunts brought her to arranged meeting points in Dublin, where she was twice abused by Lewicki in the space of a month.
Lewicki is a wealthy electronics engineer who owned an electronics factory in Tullamore at the time of the abuse. He filmed the abuse, using three video cameras, and saved the videotapes.
He gave the aunts money and the girl gifts, according to German prosecutors. Lewicki showed no emotion as the verdict was read out, but later said: "They were just prostitutes."
He agreed that the incidents occurred but, in a statement to the court, denied he was a paedophile. He said he regretted the two incidents, which, he said, arose from "scientific interest".
The victim took the stand on Thursday to tell the court through a translator that she did not remember the incidents, or the accused man. But when shown still images from the tapes, she positively indentified herself.
When reaching its verdict the four-judge court took into account the length of time Lewicki already spent in custody and his poor health. He suffered three heart attacks and three strokes while serving his sentence in a Czech prison.
Judge Reiner Gros, the lead judge in the case, stressed that the court's verdict covered only the Irish case and not other cases involving at least nine young girls in the Czech Republic.
After his arrest in the Czech Republic in 1996, Interpol asked Swiss police to search his residence in Zurich. There police found substantial child pornography material and production equipment.
The videotapes involving the Irish victim were found in Lewicki's safety-deposit box in a Zürich bank.
Some 23 tapes were forwarded to German prosecutors, two of which were passed on to the gardaí in Dublin.
The videotapes were shown to the court in a closed sitting.