11 cricketers probed for sexual assaults
11 cricketers probed for sexual assaults
On Thursday, Rubel Hossain, who has been named in Bangladesh squad for next month’s ICC World Cup 2015 squad in Australia and New Zealand, was remanded to custody over allegations that he raped an actress. H Natarajan lists 10 other instances of cricketers getting into trouble for sexual assaults.
1. Makhaya Ntini
In early 1999, was charged and convicted with rape. Ntini, the first black cricketer to play for South Africa, maintained his innocence and was subsequently acquitted. His international career which looked like meeting a pre-mature end when he was first charged with rape, continued till 2009. He played 109 Tests and took 390 wickets and 173 One-Day Internationals (ODIs) in which he scalped 266 wickets.
2. Steve Randell
Stephen Grant Randell was a little-known left-handed batsman who played for South Hobart and Sandy Bay clubs. His claim to fame was when he became an international umpire. Steve Randell, a primary school teacher by profession, became the first Tasmanian to stand in a Test when he officiated in the Australia-West Indies Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) in 1984-85. He was just 38 and in his prime as an international umpire when he was convicted by the Tasmanian Supreme Court in August in 1999 on 15 separate counts of assault against nine schoolgirls between 1981 and 1982. He was jailed for four years. When his career ended abruptly, he had officiated in 33 Test — more than any other Australian.
3. Lorrie Wilmot
Anthony Lorraine Wilmot was a South African First-class who played from 1960-61 to 1988-89. In 2000, he was convicted of raping a 13-year-old girl and sentenced to 12 years in prison, with three of them suspended. But on February 29, 2004, he committed suicide by shooting himself on his farm near Grahamston. He was 60.
4. Alan Lilley
In May 2011, Alan Lilley, a former Essex cricketer, was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and released on bail. Lilley, a married father-of-one, quit his £75,000 job as an executive at Essex County Cricket Club, days after being accused of a sexual assault at the cricket ground. All charges against him were later dropped. The former opener played 120 First-Class matches for Essex between 1978-1990.
5. Uday Joshi
In March 2012, an off-spinner who played Ranji Trophy for Gujarat, Saurashtra and Railways, and county cricket for Sussex, was convicted for sexually molesting a boy more than 30 years ago. Uday Joshi, who was 68 when convicted in 2012, was jailed for six years. The victim was 13-year-old when the offences were committed. Joshi’s First-Class career spanned 1965-83 in which he 186 matches and took 557 wickets.
6. Ryan Hinds
Towards the end of March 2012, Ryan Hinds was charged with raping a 28-year-old woman, but released on bail after appearing before a magistrate court in Bridgetown, Barbados. The bail was conditional; Hinds had to surrender his passport and report to the Holetown Police Station once per week as the other conditions of his bail. In February 2014, Hinds was cleared of the sexual assault charges after the complainant informed the court that she would not be presenting evidence. “The dropping of these charges is an immense weight off my shoulders,” Hinds said later.
7. Peter Roebuck
His First-Class playing career spanned 1974 to 1991-335 matches and scored 17,558 runs with 33 hundreds. He captained Somerset, a team that had the likes of Viv Richards, Ian Botham and Joel Garner — with all of whom he had a frosty relationship. The Cambridge-educated Roebuck’s greater fame was an author and journalist — one of the finest the game has produced. Roebuck was just 55 when on November 12, 2011 he jumped to his death from his sixth floor hotel room in Cape Town after a detective and a uniformed officer from the sexual crimes unit of the Cape Town police began interrogating him. Roebuck had phoned commentator Jim Maxwell to get him a lawyer. Maxwell said that Roebuck informed him that there were two officers in his room and they were going to arrest him on a charge of sexual assault.
In 2001, Maxwell appeared as a character witness for Roebuck when he received a suspended sentence for assault after beating three 19-year-old cricketers across their bare buttocks. The South African teenagers had been invited to stay at his former home in Taunton, Somerset, for coaching in the late 1990s. Maxwell defended his friend, “People will make assumptions about Peter because of that sentence 10 years ago. But as far as I know nothing untoward ever happened with all the young people Peter supported. He spent thousands of dollars of his own money helping people and supporting cricket. He was a philanthropist.”
8. Ian King
Ian King, a former Queensland state cricketer, was convicted by the ACT Supreme Court of more than 20 child sex charges committed in Canberra about two decades ago. King was arrested in 2008 after police received complaints from the victims. King pleaded guilty to the offences against five boys whom he coached in junior cricket in Canberra between 1988 and 1998. One of the charges carried a potential life sentence in prison. The sentence was delayed following concerns about his mental health. But On February 15, 2012 in the Supreme Court found King fit to plead, on the basis of a psychiatric report, and convicted him. King, considered to be the fastest bowler to represent Queensland since Wes Hall, was one of the few indigenous Australians to play First-Class cricket.
9. Luke Pomersbach
In May 2012, Luke Pomersbach was arrested and charged with molesting a woman and assaulting her fiancé in a New Delhi hotel. Pomersbach, who represented Royal Challengers Bangalore, was released on bail but had to surrender his passport. The charges against him were dropped after the case settled out of court. The 30-year-old Pomersbach, who has played one T20 International for Australia in 2007, was purchased by Kings XI Punjab for the 2013 Indian Premier League for US $ 300,000. The left-handed batsman has a history of getting into trouble for several drunken behavior. He was lucky to escape jail sentence after admitting to assaulting a police officer and drunk driving.
10. Manrick Singh
In April 2014, Manrick Singh, 27, a former Malaysian national cricketer, received a 90-day conditional sentence order last week in North Vancouver, while his brother, Tekbinderpal Bhar, 20, was given a suspended sentence in a case involving a 13-year-old girl. Manrick, who was caught by Facebook’s security monitoring team for inappropriate sexual chat, pleaded guilty to a charge of Internet luring. He received a term of house arrest and 18 months’ probation. Bhar also pleaded guilty to sexual assault on the same victim and was put on probation. In an earlier incident in 2013, Bhar was charged with sexual touching of an under-16 between while Singh Manrick faced a charge of Internet luring of an under-16 during the same time. Both the brothers have been placed on the national sexual offender registry for 10 years.
11. Rubel Hossain
On January 8, 2015, the Bangladeshi cricketer was detained after his ex-girlfriend said alleged he fraudulently promised to marry her in order to have sex. The allegations of 19-year-old Bazin Akter tantamount to rape claim under Bangladeshi law. Hossain, who is in the Bangladesh squad for next month’s World Cup, claims he is innocent and said he will appeal against the court’s decision to deny him bail. He says he is being blackmailed by Bazin. The 25-year-old medium-pacer has played 22 Tests and 53 ODIs since his debut in 2009.
(H Natarajan is a journalistic schizophrenic who oscillates between two polar opposite forms of writing — analytical and insightful on the one hand, and rib-tickling humour on the other)