Mother of British teenager found guilty of lying about rape is among those who have publicly rejected the verdict

Pressure is mounting on the Cypriot authorities to reassess the case of a British teenager found guilty of lying about being gang-raped as anger rises over the verdict.

Calls for a tourism boycott of the country were backed by the woman’s mother, who said Ayia Napa, the holiday resort in which her 19-year-old daughter said the attack took place, was unsafe.

“If you go and report something that’s happened to you, you’re either laughed at, as far as I can tell, or, in the worst case, something like what’s happened to my daughter may happen,” she told the BBC.

The teenager said she was raped by up to 12 Israeli tourists in a hotel room on 17 July. But after she signed a retraction statement 10 days later, she was charged and a dozen men aged between 15 and 22 who had been arrested over the incident freed.

Her mother said the woman, who had been due to begin university in September, was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), hallucinations and sleeping for up to 20 hours a day as a result of the condition hypersomnia.

During a five-month trial, the Briton claimed she had been forced to change her account under pressure from Cypriot police, telling the judge she was “scared for my life”. On Monday, she was ruled by a judge to have wilfully indulged in public mischief.

The teenager, who spent a month in Nicosia general prison before being bailed at the end of August, has been prevented from leaving Cyprus since July. She could face up to a year in prison and a €1,700 (£1,500) fine when she is sentenced on 7 January.

Within hours of the court decision being announced, calls for a boycott appeared on social media. The storm erupted as Britain’s Foreign Office, in a highly unusual step, also raised “serious concerns” over the woman receiving a fair trial.

On Monday judge Michalis Papathanasiou, sitting in Famagusta’s district court, pronounced that prosecutors had proved her guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

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The verdict has also put the government of President Nicos Anastasiades on the defensive.

As one of the region’s most popular destinations, with an economy greatly dependent on the tourist industry, calls for a boycott have taken the affair to another level. UK tourists top the league tables of arrivals, and Politis, a leading daily, described the Mediterranean country as being “up against the wall”.

But while the government spokesman, Kyriakos Kousios, expressed sympathy for the Briton’s mother, he also described public reaction to the case as “exaggerated”.

“I can understand the mother because she is the mother and I would expect any mother to do anything possible to help her daughter or son,” he told the Guardian. “But we are not happy with the extent of publicity and the reaction, which has been exaggerated. We would have wished that these [boycott] calls hadn’t happened.”

The island nation’s court system, like its judiciary, was entirely independent of the state mechanism, the spokesman insisted. As a former crown colony, Cyprus’s legal system is based on British law.

“As a government we cannot, under any circumstances, intervene in a pending case before the court,” he said, repeating that court proceedings were initiated only after the student retracted her original complaint. “What would happen if a Cypriot was brought before a court in the UK? Would the government intervene and would the Cypriots campaign to boycott England?” he asked.

Her lawyers have argued that, in contravention of EU community law, a statement retracting the rape claim was signed by the teenager with no lawyer present and after eight hours of police interrogation that was neither videoed nor recorded. Determined to clear her name, they have vowed to take the case to Cyprus’s supreme court and, if necessary, the European court of human rights.

On Monday Papathanasiou argued that, motivated by anger, the teenager had falsely levelled the rape claim against the Israelis, when she realised video clips of her having consensual sex with one of them had been recorded by others in the group on their mobile phones.

Her testimony before the court had been “evasive” and “contradictory”, he said. Protesters, led by women activists, have deplored the judgment, calling it the product of a system that remains insensitive to gender and rape.

As condemnation of the verdict spreads, so does internal dissent over the way the case has been handled. On Tuesday a former attorney general, Alekos Markides, added to the criticism, saying the matter should have been wrapped up long ago instead of assuming such international proportions. “It should have ended with the one-month prison sentence and not assumed such dimensions,” he told a local radio station.

As an offence, causing public mischief was among the lightest on the statute books, he said. Blaming the international outcry on the court’s obstinacy, he also criticised the legal system for targeting “a 19-year-old tourist who we have kept in Cyprus for five months now, a … girl who has a clean criminal record … who we have forced to collect donations to cover her legal costs and have forbidden from travelling to her country. This rigidity of the court has provoked reaction internationally.”