Pressure mounts for Prince Andrew to lose his military posts over child abuse charges

More and more voices within the British Army are calling for Prince Andrew, Queen Elizabeth II’s second son and accused of alleged child abuse in the United States, to be stripped of his military titles. The newspaper collects the testimony of Julian Perreira, a veteran of the Grenadier Guards, who calls for the “immediate resignation” of the Duke of York as colonel of that infantry regiment, an honorary position he inherited in 2017 from his father, the late Prince Felipe.Perreira declares that allowing him to continue with that and other titles in the Armed Forces will be “a stain on the proud history” of the Grenadiers and “will devalue their work”. According to the newspaper, the officers have been uncomfortable having to toast the Duke’s health during the dinners of this regiment.” The Times” points out that Andrew, 61, holds nine military positions and it is up to his mother, the Queen, to officially withdraw them. The prince faces civil proceedings in New York initiated by Australian-American Virginia Giuffre, 38, who accuses him of sexually abusing her on three occasions when she was 17, which the duke denies. Giuffre alleges that she was the victim of sex trafficking by US financier Jeffrey Epstein – who committed suicide in pre-trial detention in 2019 – and his ex-girlfriend and collaborator, British financier Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted on December 29 of sex trafficking with minors in an ongoing parallel criminal proceeding. Thanks to the couple’s mediation, the prince, a friend of both, would have sexually abused her in London, New York and on a private island of Epstein in the Caribbean, he argues. With part of the lawsuit against Andrew, it is expected that today the New York court will make public an out-of-court settlement that Giuffre would have signed with Epstein and that, according to the defense of the Duke of York, would exonerate him of any responsibility. The young woman’s lawyers have requested documents proving the “inability to sweat” that Isabel II’s son alleged as an “alibi” to deny that he knew the plaintiff, who had detailed in an interview that he had sweated profusely in one of their meetings.

Original source in Spanish