A British
soldier has been jailed for nine years for drunkenly raping a
six-year-old girl in her bedroom while stationed on an adventure course
with his unit. Craig Stormey, 30, was on an alpine skiing course with
the 7th Parachute Regiment Royal Horse Artillery in the Stubai Valley,
Austria, when the horrific assault took place.
Today Judge
Norbert Hofer said it was ‘impossible’ to find an appropriate punishment
given the severity of the attack and ranked it among the ‘worst kind of
abuse of a child’s physical well-being’.
The court at Innsbruck, in the province
of Tyrol, heard that the attack took place in November 2014 when the
Afghanistan veteran drunkenly entered an unlocked house, stripped off
and started to perform sexual acts on the sleeping child.
The girl’s father told the court: ‘I was lying in my bed and saw a figure holding a child in his arms.
‘I was half asleep and first thought it was my wife but then I realised she was lying next to me.
‘Then I saw the naked stranger in another room with my daughter. I completely flipped and hit him several times in the face.’
During the fight, his wife and their daughter fled the house as he called the police.
He added: ‘Our daughter has managed to cope with the incident relatively well. But she has a very good memory.’
The
defendant, who was in Tyrol on an ‘Adventure Camp’ with his unit, said
that he had ‘quite a few’ drinks with his friends but could not remember
why he left the pub they were drinking in or why he entered the house.
He said:
‘There is no explanation for what I did, and there is also no excuse.
All I can remember is fighting inside a house with a man, and a woman
who held a child in her arms.’
He told the
court he had suffered from PTSD having fought in war zones and had seen
severe sexual assaults among soldiers on the battlefield. He also
apologised to the girl and her parents.
Police arrested the accused in the house and since then he had been in detention in Innsbruck prison while awaiting trial.
Medical investigators examined the little girl and backed her claims of the events.
Judge Norbert Hofer said that the defendant ‘had made sexual actions that can hardly be topped.’
Psychiatrist
Reinhard Haller said that Mr Stormy had signs of a post-traumatic
stress disorder from tours in Afghanistan but certified him as legally
sane.
Dr Haller
had previously worked on the case of Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian
woman who was kidnapped at the age of ten and held captive for eights
before escaping.
Laszlo Szabo, Mr Stormey’s lawyer, said: ‘The combination of alcohol and his trauma played a major role.
‘In spite of this, he had shown no such inclinations for all his life and therefore his actions remain inexplicable.’
Mr Szabo was planning to appeal the sentence.
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