London: One of Rolf Harris' child sex convictions has been quashed on appeal, because a key witness at his trial was later discovered to be a fantasist who had invented an implausible tour of duty in Korea.
The English Court of Appeal, however, denied the 87-year-old Australian former entertainer the right to appeal his other 11 convictions.
The court delivered its judgment on Thursday morning, London time. Harris did not attend court.
Lord Justice Treacy agreed with prosecutors that it would not be in the public interest to retry the quashed conviction, that Harris groped an eight-year-old girl at a community centre near Portsmouth in the late 1960s.
Lord Treacy in the court's written judgment said, however, that there was "nothing that causes us to doubt the safety of [the other 11] convictions".
Harris was convicted in June 2014 on 12 counts of indecent assault against four women, who were aged between eight and 19 at the time of the attacks.
He was sentenced to five years and nine months in jail. Harris left prison in May this year.
His lawyers had told the court earlier this month that fresh evidence meant convictions on four counts, against two of the women, were unsafe.
The other convictions should be reversed as well, they argued, as the jury had considered Harris' entire alleged history of sexual abuse when considering each charge.
Stephen Vullo, QC, for Harris, said the fresh evidence, compiled by a long, expensive and painstaking investigation by private investigators, was "credible, it's reliable, it goes to the central issue in the case and it wasn't raised at the trial".
The testimony of the father of the eight-year-old alleged victim, and two ex-police officers, made it "blindingly obvious" that Harris had never been at the community centre where his victim had said he groped her, Mr Vullo argued.
Lord Treacy dismissed much of the fresh evidence, including that of the father, as insignificant or unreliable.
"By far the most cogent" fresh evidence before the court, he wrote, was that relating to David James, the only person other than the alleged victim to confirm that Harris visited the community centre.
It was an "oddity" that no one had picked up a reference by Mr James to being on leave from a tour of duty in Korea at the time, though the war had ended a decade and a half earlier, Lord Treacy said in the written judgment.
"For some reason, at the time of trial the necessary checks [of the witness' background] had not been made or had not properly been made," he said.
"This was a significant failing. If the material had been obtained and disclosed at the correct time it is very doubtful that Mr James would have been called as a witness.
"The exposure of the truth about his military service and employment history would have been of great significance. Mr James was a very important witness."
Mr Vullo also argued the jury had not seen medical evidence about another of Harris' victims, which showed she had told counsellors about her abuse by a family member almost 50 times without mentioning Harris.
She later said Harris had groped her repeatedly in a London pub when she was 15.
Mr Vullo suggested that she appropriated the details of the attack from media reports on the late English celebrity Jimmy Savile.
But the court found that there was "nothing new which might have assisted the defence or undermined the Crown" in the new evidence, and nothing that showed the victim was a fantasist or likely to make false allegations.
"We do not think that this evidence would provide a basis for allowing an appeal and we decline to receive it in evidence," Lord Treacy said.
The quashing of the first conviction did not make the others unsafe, the court ruled.
"The primary evidence [of the other victims] remained intact," they said, and the jury had heard 'bad character evidence' from other witnesses who claimed to have been groped by Harris.
The court concluded that "the Crown does not seek a re-trial [on the quashed conviction]. We agree that one is not in the public interest."
In May this year Harris was cleared of four other charges of historical sex offences, against girls as young as 13, after two trials ended with hung juries.
