Chilean abuse victim testifies to Vatican

NEW YORK: The key witness in the case of a Chilean bishop accused of covering sexual abuse yesterday said he gave ‘‘eyeopening’’ testimony to a papally mandated investigator and hoped it would lead to the truth.

Juan Carlos Cruz met Archbishop Charles Scicluna, one of the most experienced and respected Vatican investigators of clergy sexual abuse, in a church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for about four hours.

The Vatican announced on January 30 Pope Francis had appointed Scicluna to look into accusations Bishop Juan Barros of the diocese of Osorno in Chile had covered up crimes against minors.

It was a dramatic Uturn for the Pope, who eight days earlier told reporters aboard his plane returning from Latin America he was sure Barros was innocent and that the Vatican had received no concrete evidence against him.

Haiti’s president said at the weekend that sexual misconduct by staff of British charity Oxfam was only the tip of an ‘‘iceberg’’ and called for investigations into Doctors Without Borders and other aid organisations which came to the country after its 2010 earthquake.

‘‘The Oxfam case is the visible part of the iceberg,’’ President Jovenel Moise said. ‘‘It is not only Oxfam. There are other nongovernmental organisations in the same situation, but they hide the information internally.’’

Oxfam, one of the world’s biggest disaster relief charities, apologised last week after a report said some of its staff paid for sex with prostitutes.—