A boy has been sentenced to two years rehabilitation after being found guilty of the rape of a girl a few days after his 12th birthday in 2014.

At the end of a two-day trial at Llandudno youth court district judge Gwyn Jones had also found the boy guilty of two cases of sexual assault against a girl under 13, and inciting her to carry out a sexual act on him.

He had denied the four charges, alleged to have happened in the dark on two separate occasions while waiting for a youth club to open.

The boy, now 15 and living in Wrexham, had said the four offences against the girl, slightly older than him, simply didn’t happen but the district judge said her evidence had been “credible and consistent”.

A five-year restraining order was made and the teen must register as a sex offender for two-and-a-half years.

The judge said: "I have got to consider what is the best way in which to deal with you in the long-term with a view to ensuring you don’t come back before this court. I would be entitled to consider a detention and training order.

“However, I also have had the opportunity of reading and considering a lot of material prepared about your background.”

He added :”This is now your opportunity. What has happened in the past must remain in the past.”

The court heard that the girl had not wished to tell her parents and it wasn’t until 2016, after she had confided in a school friend, that police inquiries began. The district judge found that she had not made up the evidence maliciously to get the boy into trouble but “had difficulties coming to terms with what happened.” In a video interview when the case opened the girl claimed she’d been stripped naked, but she had been too scared to tell anyone.

“If I had told somebody it would be spread across the village. If I had told my dad he would have stormed down and killed him,” she explained.

In evidence the boy had told his barrister, James Coutts, that he wasn’t a friend of the girl and didn’t spend time with her.

“I was always playing football,” he maintained. Answering Ffion Tomos, prosecuting, he claimed to have been “shocked and upset” when some of her friends came up to him in school and suggested he’d raped her a few years earlier.

“It wasn’t true,” he insisted.

At the sentencing hearing, Mr Coutts said: "He’s a completely different person to the person he was when he was twelve.”