A defrocked American priest was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Tuesday for sexually abusing children at an orphanage in East Timor he founded, after a trial that has divided the South Asian country -Is deeply Catholic.
At least 15 women accused Richard Daschbach, 84, of subjecting them to forced touching and sex as children at the Catholic institution in Oecusse, a Timorese enclave in Indonesia.
Oecusse District Court judges found Pittsburgh-born Richard Daschbach guilty on several counts of child sexual abuse at the facility he founded in the 1990s to house hundreds of orphans and poor children.
The former American Catholic priest was sentenced to a total of 37 years in prison but judges took his advanced age into account in reducing the sentence.
“Richard Daschbach is sentenced to 12 years for sex crimes against minors and taking into account the age of the defendant,” said Yudi Pamungkas, president of the court.
The judges demanded that the convict be immediately imprisoned to prevent him from escaping.
The court also ordered the Timorese authorities to pay financial compensation to the victims of the priest’s sexual abuse.
Richard Daschbach was in court for the verdict – open to the public after a closed-door trial that began in June.
Several victims accused the cleric of having kept lists with the names of the children who were to spend the night with him. They accused him of multiple rapes and touching.
But part of the Timorese have questioned these accusations and many victims refuse to be identified, fearing reprisals.
This affair has deeply divided the former Portuguese colony where he was for a long time a revered figure.
The Church is a highly respected institution in East Timor, a small country that shares a border with Indonesia, and where 97% of the population is Catholic.
Richard Daschbach, who arrived in Timor as a missionary, was defrocked by the Vatican in 2018 but the accusations of sexual abuse were not published until the following year by local media.