Ex-priest in Hong Kong convicted of sexually abusing altar boy in case that rocked local Catholic church

A former Roman Catholic priest was convicted Monday of molesting a 15-year-old altar boy then ordered to jail while he awaits sentencing in a pedophilia-and-coverup case that rocked Hong Kong's church.

Michael Lau said nothing in court and showed no emotion as a judge found him guilty of two counts of indecent assault, one of attempted sodomy and one of gross indecency.

District Court Judge Maggie Poon ordered psychiatric and psychological testing for the 42-year-old Lau before she sentences him on Feb. 17 for the crimes committed more than a decade ago.

The most serious charges against Lau carry up to 10 years in prison each, but prosecutors said he faces only up to seven years because that is the harshest sentence that a District Court in Hong Kong can hand down.

The victim is now 27 and cannot be identified by name, but is said to have suffered from schizophrenia several years after the abuses. Defense lawyers had attacked his credibility on the basis of his mental illness, saying he probably dreamed up the abuses.

But Poon rejected the defense arguments, saying Monday she found the young man "honest, credible and reliable."

Poon said she believed the victim's testimony was a "recollection of actual events rather than recollection of past delusions."

The judge had earlier turned down arguments from the defense that Lau could not get a fair trial because so much time had elapsed since the alleged abuses in 1991 and 1992.

Hoping to gain lenience for Lau, defense attorney Bernard Chung asked the judge to impose concurrent sentences, meaning they would all be served at once.

Lau, who has become an insurance agent, is the only person arrested thus far in the child sex scandal that hit Hong Kong's Roman Catholic Church last year and echoed a crisis that had engulfed the church in the United States and elsewhere.

The church defrocked Lau in 1995 after an internal investigation found that he twice molested the victim an altar boy at the time.

The church never reported its findings to the police. But after more cases of alleged sexual abuse by priests who worked in Hong Kong emerged last year, church officials said they had adopted a zero-tolerance policy and would be more cooperative with the authorities.

The Hong Kong diocese said in a statement it was "inappropriate" for the church to comment on Lau's conviction because it hadn't studied "the reasons for the verdict."