Men guilty of child sex abuse at boys’ school in Fife
Two men have been found guilty of historic abuse against former pupils at a boys’ school in Scotland.
John Farrell, 73, and Paul Kelly, 64, were charged with sexual and physical abuse of more than 20 ex-pupils of St Ninian's School in Falkland, Fife, between 1979 and 1983.
Farrell was found guilty of four charges and Kelly was convicted of seven in charges that involved six victims.
Their conviction follows one of the biggest abuse inquiries of its kind in Scotland.
The pair committed indecent acts on vulnerable boys in their care aged 11 to 15 and forced the children to perform sex acts on them and on each other.
They punished the children by forcing them to stand naked in a hallway, the High Court in Glasgow heard.
The men were remanded in custody after a jury found Farrell, from Motherwell, North Lanarkshire, guilty of three counts of indecent assault and a charge of assaulting a boy with a belt.
Kelly, from Plymouth, Devon, was convicted of four counts of indecent assault and three assault charges, including hitting a boy's head off sinks at the school.
Charges against three other men were earlier dropped.
St Ninian's was a Catholic school run by the Congregation of Christian Brothers, a religious order, until it closed in the 1980s. It housed around 45 boys in need of care.