AN AID worker facing child smuggling charges has celebrated his release on bail from a Romanian prison by revealing: "I hope to be back home for Christmas."

John Boast, of Great Harwood, was speaking on the day his trial was due to resume in the Transylvanian town of Oradea.

Mr Boast, 46, was released from the town's squalid jail by the trial judge last Friday after spending four months behind bars, a move exclusively revealed in the Lancashire Evening Telegraph.

Now he has said: "I hope to be home for Christmas and then I want to return to Romania in the New Year to continue the work I was doing before my arrest.

"I can see the end of the tunnel. I believe the court case will be over by the end of November and it is only reasonable to think that the trial judge would not contemplate releasing me if he thought he would have to lock me up again. It would be stupid. "The prosecution appealed against his decision to a higher court but could not get it overturned."

Mr Boast spent several years taking aid to Romania before his arrest at the beginning of this year, following allegations that he helped take a 15-month-old girl out of the country.

He was put in prison in May after being accused of further child smuggling offences. He said: "The law over here is very ambiguous but there is no evidence against me.

"I feel I have given enough and worked hard enough here to be treated with a certain amount of compassion.

"I just want to achieve a situation where I can come back and carry on the work."

Mr Boast said he had been accused of everything from being a child smuggler to a mercenary carrying out killings in Yugoslavia during the past few months. And he launched a stinging attack on the police over his treatment.

He said: "The police have been absolutely disgraceful and their case has been a mixture of suggestion, exaggeration and fiction. None of it has any basis in truth."

"Prison was horrible. On one day I was fed soup which was little more than coloured water with a pig's ear in it.

"And on June 16 I was kept awake by the screams of a young lad of 10 or 12 who was being interrogated in the prison where I was being held."

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