Child rapist handed maximum nine-year prison sentence

A court has handed 68-year-old William Gatt a maximum nine-year sentence, after it found him guilty of having raped a seven year-old girl in 2002.

Magistrate Audrey Demicoli heard how in late 2010, the police had, through Interpol, received a report from a British police force regarding the abuse of a seven-year-old girl from St. Paul’s Bay in 2002. The girl’s family had emigrated to the UK in the intervening years.

The abuse had been revealed when the girl, then aged 13, had told her story to a school counsellor to whom she had been referred after she had tried to slit her wrists whilst at school in the UK.

She had told the counsellor that her family used to live in Malta when she had been around seven or eight years old. She would often play games in the street with her friends, and a man who lived nearby would invite her into his home to play with his cat. She said that she had done so on several occasions.

But the last time she had done so, she said the man had taken her into his bedroom, where he tied her up and raped her.

Gatt was investigated and then arrested and charged with rape, aggravated by the age of the victim, corruption of a minor under the age of twelve through violence, unlawfully detaining the girl against her will and violent indecent assault.

During his interrogation, he had admitted that the girl would visit his house to observe his various pets and that he knew the girl’s mother was English and her father was Maltese, but denied sexually abusing the minor. 

However Gatt had told interrogating officers that he liked to perform sex acts on and in the presence of little girls, linking this to an alcohol problem he had, some six years before.

Testifying via video link, the girl had told the court how she had not told anyone about her abuse, but would suffer overwhelming depression because of it.

She recalled how, after Gatt had invited her into his home to show her his cats, he had told her to sit down in the bedroom whilst he went to get them. But when he returned five minutes later, he had tied her hand and leg to the bed with a rope and raped the minor. During the abuse, Gatt had threatened to kill members of her family if she ever told a soul about what had taken place.

Gatt chose to testify in his defence, telling the court that the girl would often visit his home to play with his cat, but had denied tying the girl up. He insisted that she would exclusively play with the cat in the living room, after which she would leave. But on one occasion, said the accused, he had caught her opening a drawer in his bedroom and he had thrown her out of his house. 

He claimed that the girl’s allegations were simply lies, prompted by the girl’s father, to whom he had refused to lend LM2,000.

Confronted with the fact that he had not mentioned this during his interrogation, Gatt replied that the police’s line of questioning had not given him the opportunity to. Even when it was pointed out to him that he had said, in his initial statement, that he “liked girls”, he insisted that he was referring to adults and denied even stating that he enjoyed performing sex acts on young girls and boys.

The court noted that in this police statement, he had gone so far as to clarify that “regarding the girls, I repeat that it has all finished now.”

In addition, the man had raised the plea of prescription, claiming the case was time-barred.

In finding the accused guilty, the magistrate recalled the behaviour and body language of the victim whilst she was testifying, noting that it indicated that she had been telling the truth and was evidently still traumatised. 

Magistrate Demicoli said she could not imagine a reason for the girl to come up with such a story after so many years and whilst living abroad, other than because the events having left an indelible mark on her. It discarded the accused’s claim that the girl’s father was behind the accusations, noting that this would have made sense had he done so whilst they were still living in Malta but not after all these years.

The court found Gatt and guilty imposed the maximum sentence of nine years incarceration.

Police inspector Louise Calleja prosecuted.