Rolf Harris cleared of three sex charges
LONDON: Veteran Australian entertainer Rolf Harris was on Wednesday cleared of three sex offences by a London court, but the jury was discharged on four other counts after failing to reach a verdict.
Harris, a household name in Britain for more than 50 years, was accused of six counts of indecent assault and one of sexual assault, taking place between 1971 and 2004.
The jury took almost a week to find the 86-year- old not guilty of two indecent assault charges and of sexual assault.
Harris was cleared of groping a blind disabled woman in London in 1977 and of sexually assaulting a woman in her 40s after the filming of a television show in 2004.
Judge Alistair McCreath discharged the 12-member jury on the remaining four counts, and the prosecution team have one week to decide if they will apply for a retrial on the charges that split jurors.
Harris watched via a videolink from prison, where he is currently serving a sentence of almost six years after being convicted in 2014 of 12 sex offences against four female victims, one aged as young as seven or eight.
His defence team claimed the initial convictions were “wrong” and that the resultant media coverage had “without doubt made him vulnerable to people making accusations against him”. — AFP