Man goes on trial in Derry charged with alleged rape in Spain

In the first prosecution of its kind in the North, a thirty-five years old local man has gone on trial at Derry Crown Court charged with raping a seventeen years old girl in a Spanish hotel during the summer of 2014.
The complainant in the case also comes from Derry.
Michael Joseph Cregan from Ferguson Street denies raping the complainant in a bedroom which they shared with two other people in the Hotel Los Alamos, at Torremolinos near Malaga in Spain between July 31 and August 20, 2014.
The jury was told that a party of six, all of them from Derry, went on holiday to the hotel together. The party of six included the complainant and the defendant, the complainant’s sister and her sister’s then partner, the complainant’s father and a male family friend.
Prosecuting barrister John Orr Q.C., told the jurors that the case was unusual, in that it was an extra-terrestrial case brought under Article 76 of the 2008 Sexual Offences Order which allowed for offences which allegedly occur outside of the U.K. to be brought before a court in the U.K.