Schoolboys '˜made up abuse claims'

Wayne Kelly is alleged to have taken advantage of the teenagers and manipulated them to fulfil his sexual desires.

One of the charges he faces involved his former partner, Amy Fairhurst, but she has now been cleared.

After the prosecution offered no further evidence against 20-year-old Fairhurst, of Bridgewater Street, Hindley, the mother of Kelly’s child, she was discharged from the dock.

The jury acquitted her of engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a 14-year-old boy and two offences of sexual assaulting him.

She had denied all the allegations.

Kelly, 38, of Lower St Stephen Street, Gidlow, denies four charges of rape, three of sexual activity with a child, three of inciting a child to engage in sexual activity, two of sexual assault and two of supplying cannabis.

Iain Simkin, prosecuting, has told the jury of six men and six women that it is alleged that Kelly became the victims’ drug dealer who provided them with an address where they could take drugs.

“All this was part of a process undertaken by Wayne Kelly to gain the boys’ trust, isolate them and ultimately sexually abuse them,” he claimed.

Kelly, who was then living in Gidlow Lane, Wigan, began supplying the first victim with cannabis when he was just 13 years old and they used to smoke it together.

While he was still only 13 years old Kelly raped the boy, who was high on drugs, and this happened on more than one occasion over the next two years including once in Kelly’s van, alleged Mr Simkin.

The second victim claims he was 14 when Kelly sexually abused him including a “bizarre” request for the boy to rub packaged cannabis over his genital area to rid it of DNA or fingerprint evidence.

Mr Simkin described this as “a highly unusual and signature offence” reflected in a claim of an identical request made to the third victim by Kelly.

Kelly told the jury that the there was no truth in the sex allegations and claimed the boys had made them up as they had fallen out with him and his family.

One of the boys has alleged that Kelly sexually abused him in the back of Kelly’s works van and told how he made him take his shoes off and began caressing his feet and then sexually molested him.

Kelly denied any of the boys had been in his van, though he had once rolled a cannabis joint for that boy at the rear of the vehicle.

Questioned by his barrister David Watson he agreed that he has a foot fetish “but not in a sexual way”.

He also agreed that he had supplied another of the boys with cannabis and the jury heard that he will be entering a guilty plea to that offence.

Asked about the allegations of asking boys to rub packages of cannabis over their genitals he claimed that was untrue.

Proceeding