Church expels former QC accused of beating boys

JOHN SMYTH has been expelled from the church in South Africa where he had been living after church leaders said he refused to return to the UK and engage with police.

The former QC is accused of beating boys at Christian holiday camps which he ran in the UK in the late 1970s.

He moved to Zimbabwe and then South Africa, where he had been worshipping at the Church-on-Main, which operates from four sites in Cape Town. But last month the church’s leaders published a statement on its website saying that Mr Smyth and his wife Anne had been expelled.

In the statement, signed by the church’s elders, they said they found it “necessary to excommunicate John and Anne from Church-on-Main, with all of its full scriptural implications”. The