A Belfast murder trial heard yesterday a man told the RUC he "hadn't a clue" how the body of a 13-year-old girl came to be found in his coal bunker nearly five years after the girl disappeared.
Mr James Junior Craig (26), who denies murdering Sonia Forsythe, told police he last saw her on the evening she went missing on June 30th, 1991. He said she had walked with him to a bar on Shankill Road to buy cigarettes. She had left him when they returned to Sydney Street West, where they were neighbours.
Her body was found in the coal bunker in 1996. During interviews Mr Craig told police he had lived in the house for almost five years, and said he had used the coal bunker whenever he had money to buy coal. When told that a neighbour had seen Sonia sitting with him on his settee in the front room of his home on the night she went missing, Mr Craig replied: "She was not in my house at all."
The trial continues.