BRITAIN: The former girlfriend of the caretaker accused of killing British schoolgirls Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells broke down in tears when police told her they had charged him with their murder, the Old Bailey in London was told yesterday.
"He cannot have been," Ms Maxine Carr repeated after detectives revealed that Mr Ian Huntley's fingerprints had been discovered on a bag found containing the girl's clothes.
"Ian's not done anything. I can't tell you any more because I don't know any more," she said.
The Old Bailey was hearing further extracts from Ms Carr's interview with police after her arrest.
Ms Carr (26) told police she had dictated to Mr Huntley a fictitious list of her movements on the Sunday the 10-year-old girls disappeared.
This was to help her remember that she meant to have been in the bath when the girls called on him at their house in Soham, Cambridgeshire.
In fact she had been staying at her mother's house in Grimsby where she had spoken by phone with Mr Huntley, who told her two girls had stopped by and asked after her.
She said they had invented the alibi to protect Mr Huntley because he was scared of being drawn into the case after being falsely accused of rape in 1998.
"I wanted to protect him from the past, not the present or the future or whatever," she said.
Ms Carr added she would not have tried to protect him with the alibi if she thought he had killed the girls.
When one of the officers said "But you love him," she replied: "Yes, but I wouldn't lie about a murder. I wouldn't lie about two kids". She told them Mr Huntley had been "shaken to the core" by the huge media attention following the girls' disappearance.
Mr Huntley (29) was concerned that someone would contact police about the rape allegation and say "it must be that dodgy caretaker," Ms Carr told police.
She said Mr Huntley was not capable of killing the two girls.
"He couldn't have killed them. He wouldn't hurt anybody. He is a very emotional person. He wouldn't have the strength of mind to go through with something like that," she said.
However, she also revealed that Mr Huntley had once slapped her across the face during an argument in 2000 about Ms Carr going out with her mother.
Mr Huntley, who denies murdering the girls, has already admitted removing their bodies and taking them in his car to woodland where he dumped them in a ditch and cut off their clothes.
The bodies of the two friends were found on August 17th last year in a ditch near Lakenheath, Suffolk, about 15 miles from their homes in Soham. The children had been missing for nearly two weeks.
Ms Carr denies charges of assisting an offender and conspiring to pervert the course of justice. The case continues.