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Modern-day bogeyman Akinwale Arobieke has had a 10-year ban on touching men’s biceps lifted.

The Liverpool ‘muscle fanatic’s’ long-held fascination with pumped up physiques has led to notoriety and repeated brushes with the law.

He is known for approaching younger males and striking up conversations about weight training, before touching and measuring their muscles, and then inviting them to squat his body weight.

Now Mr Arobieke, 54, of Devonshire Road, Aigburth has vowed to ‘reinvent himself’ in a quest for a ‘fresh start’.

In 2003 he was jailed for six years after being convicted of harassing 15 well-muscled males.

Three years later, while he was still behind bars, a Sexual Offences Prevention Order (SOPO) was made, on the application of Merseyside Police, which banned him touching men’s muscles and going to gyms.

Since the SOPO was made, Mr Arobieke has appeared repeatedly in court accused of breaching it.

Now the ban has been scrapped - after Mr Arobieke successfully appealed against it.

The move brings to an end a lengthy and expensive series of hearings for alleged breaches stretching from North Wales to Manchester which have led to him spending months behind bars on remand.

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Representing himself in court, Mr Arobieke argued that while his behaviour had breached the court order, it was not actually criminal in its own right and it was not sexual.

He said if his behaviour did cross the line into criminal behaviour, then he should be dealt with under assault charges or sex charges like any other citizen.

He said: “If it’s not consensual I’ll get arrested. The common law protects every member of the public.”

Judge Richard Mansell QC, sitting at Manchester Crown Court, said while Arobieke’s breaches of the order were a ‘serious matter’ - the restrictions it placed on his freedoms could ‘no longer be justified’.

The judge said lifting the order would allow him to pursue his interest in an ‘appropriate venue’ like a gym or a bodybuilding event.

The Judge said: “The ban on touching muscles is just not on

“I’m not into bodybuilding myself, but I’d have thought men who have muscles in their arms the diameter of my leg are the sort of men who will admire each other’s bodies. They don’t build the body up to hide it under loose-fitting sweatshirts. They are men likely to talk and weigh and measure each other.”

The lifting of the SOPO came as Mr Arobieke was given a suspended sentence after admitting flouting it four times.

The court heard that in October 2013 he struck up a conversation with a 21-year-old on a Llandudno to Manchester train, and during the journey measured his bicep.

In February 2015 he clenched a 17-year-old boy’s calf muscle after befriending him at bus stop at Piccadilly. A month later, he again approached the teenager, who asked him for selfies to show his girlfriend after they got on the bus together.

The court heard Mr Arobieke then explained to him how he was a ‘muscle fanatic’ and asked if he would ‘squat’ him. The pair got off a bus together and went to a piece of wasteland where he ‘instructed’ the teenager to lift his body weight. The boy did this three times.

The two men are among a number who have made allegations against Mr Arobieke in recent years.

In his concluding remarks, the judge said that Mr Arobieke accepted he was ‘interested in, indeed obsessed’ with the musculature of men’, and that given his age and build, was ‘bound to instil at least a feeling of unease in young males, if not fear’.

But the judge added that the ‘obsessive and intimidating behaviour’ he had shown between 1997 and 2000 - which led to a six-year jail sentence - had not been repeated in recent years.

On top of this, none of the recent complainants formed the ‘slightest impression’ that he was deriving sexual gratification from them.

Judge Mansell told Arobieke: “A SOPO must only be imposed if it is necessary to protect members of the public from serious physical or psychological harm caused by the commission of sexual offences.

“You have not caused any of the complainants any physical or psychological harm in any of the cases where you have breached the order.

“Those complainants in the original case who suffered psychological harm did so because of the course of conduct you pursued in harassing them, not because of you touching their biceps or calf muscles or making them perform squat exercises.

“You have breached the order by doing that which you were prohibited in doing - but you have not displayed any overtly sexual interest in any of them, and you have not pursued and harassed any of them as you did the complainants in the late 1990s.

“The discharge of the SOPO gives you a clean slate whereby you are now on trust to behave in an appropriate manner towards other people. You now have the freedom to pursue your interest in bodybuilding and weight training and can do so not in the clandestine manner in which you have approached people and discussed these matters, but in the appropriate venue, namely a gym or bodybuilding events.

“If you behave in a manner which makes another male feel uncomfortable, or in a manner whereby you use your size and stature to overbear their consent, you risk being accused of either a common assault or more seriously a sexual assault. If you pursue anybody with the kind of obsessive manner which you did 20 years ago then you will undoubtedly be prosecuted for similar offences.”

The judge also lifted an order which banned Mr Arobieke from going to Llandudno.

The judge gave Arobieke an 18 month suspended sentence for the breach offences, suspended for two years, with a 60 day rehabilitation order and a warning that if he breached it he would jail him.