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A man has been cleared of sexually abusing three young girls during the 1990s.

Paul Shields, 57, was found not guilty of seven charges of indecent assault against the girls, who cannot be named for legal reasons.

Mr Shields, who has been a Jehovah’s Witness since birth, told a jury that although he had regularly put the girls on his lap, he had never sexually assaulted them.

Following the accusations, he had been ostracised from the church and become a pariah in Jehovah’s Witness circles because of its policy to shun those accused of such crimes.

Mr Shields, who was living in Guisborough at the time of the alleged incidents, said his 80-year-old mother, who is also a Jehovah’s Witness, and other family members of the same faith had not spoken to him since the allegations arose.

The married father-of-two said that church elders had even told his two sons not to talk to him following the accusations, which he insisted were untrue.

Mr Shields, now of Gordon Street, York, had been kicked out of the church by elders of the Guisborough fellowship following a disciplinary hearing in March 2015, even though he had never been convicted of any wrong-doing.

The Crown Prosecution Service had alleged that Mr Shields abused the girls on a number of occasions at two properties in a North Yorkshire village after luring them with video games.

Prosecutor Andrew Espley claimed that Mr Shields - who moved from Darlington to Guisborough during the alleged abuse - sexually touched the girls over their clothes but did not touch them on any intimate areas, although he “came very close”.

Mr Espley said it was not until 2014 that two of the females, who were under-age at the time but are now adult women, reported the matters to police.

Mr Shields, who was in his 30s at the time of the alleged incidents, vehemently denied the accusations and said he had had a nervous breakdown since the allegations surfaced and had been seeing a psychiatrist.

The jury returned its unanimous not-guilty verdicts on Tuesday following a week-long trial.