Smyllum nun, 76, held

Woman is 17th person arrested or reported over orphanage ‘abuse’

A NUN aged 76 has been arrested and charged over claims of abuse at a notorious orphanage.

She is the 17th person to be held by Police Scotland, or reported to prosecutors, amid a wideranging investigation of Smyllum Park in Lanark.

The Mail revealed last week that police had arrested 12 people, including nuns.

A further four were later reported to the Crown Office, some of them nuns, with ages ranging between 71 and 93. The Crown is examining those allegations.

A Police Scotland spokesman said: ‘A 76-year-old woman has been arrested and charged in connection with the non-recent abuse of children.

‘A report will be made to Crown in due course.’

Claims of historic abuse at the home have come under scrutiny at the ongoing Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI).

It is understood that those arrested within the past few weeks include nuns and former lay members of staff at the nowclosed institution. Former residents of the home have told SCAI during hearings that nuns beat them, forced them to eat vomit and ritually humiliated them for bed-wetting.

One recalled satanic abuse and another claimed a fellow child may have died after being left naked in the rain for three hours as punishment.

Another former resident compared the Daughters of Charity, which ran the Catholic institution until it closed in 1981, to Nazi concentration camp commandants.

The SCAI also heard a boy of six allegedly beaten by a nun at Smyllum days before his death may have struggled to recover from an infection as a result of the ‘trauma’.

Professor Anthony Busuttil, a forensic pathologist who worked on the Lockerbie and Dunblane tragedies, told the inquiry last year that Sammy Carr was underdeveloped and may have been malnourished.

The inquiry has previously been told the child was kicked by a nun ten days before he died in 1964.

In January, the nun in charge of the order offered its ‘deepest and most sincere apologies’ to anyone abused in its care.

At the SCAI, Sister Ellen Flynn, who is not accused of abuse, said the allegations at Smyllum are ‘totally against’ everything the order stands for.

Inquiry chairman Lady Smith is expected to publish a report shortly on the SCAI’s Smyllum ‘case study’, which will include findings on the extent of abuse.

Earlier this year, the judge said she would decide whether or not the claims were substantiated on the ‘balance of probabilities’.

This is a lower threshold than the stipulation for a charge being proven beyond ‘reasonable doubt’ in criminal courts.

Meanwhile, a separate police probe is under way over claims of abuse involving the Sisters of Nazareth, another Catholic order which came under investigation by the SCAI earlier this year.

The Mail has been told there is an ongoing police investigation into people associated with the order, which ran homes where abuse has been widely reported.

Later this year, the £15.7million child abuse inquiry is set to examine allegations of child abuse at Quarriers children’s homes.

Quarriers has said it will ‘play a full and active part’ in the SCAI when it resumes in October because it believes victims ‘have the right to be heard’.