THE case against a Roman Catholic priest accused of exhuming the remains of a boy from the grounds of a former Hereford convent has been quashed.

Father Wojciech Jasinski, who is now based in Rome, was charged with illegally removing a corpse from a grave contrary to common law.

He made his third appearance at Worcester Crown Court last week, this time to hear a successful submission by defending barrister Andrew Davidson to have the case dismissed.

Mr Davidson said the case was “straight out of a Charles Dickens novel”.

“It is a Burke and Hare offence from when people went out in the middle of the night to steal gold teeth,” he said. “Father Jasinski was acting for moral reasons which were entirely honourable.”

The 40-year-old was accused of taking a box containing the remains of Witold Ortowski from St Raphael's convent on Holme Lacy Road, Lower Bullingham, sometime between August 2008 and March 2010.

The convent is currently being marketed and the boy's mother Zofia wanted the remains – housed in a box in an overgrown wall – to be safe.

They have now been buried in a coffin in her grave in Henley-on- Thames, Oxfordshire.

Witold fled with his family from Poland to Mexico during the Second World War.

In 1944, he sat with a sick priest, who later recovered from his illness while the 14-year-old died, which had led the boy to be considered for sainthood.

His mother brought his remains with her when she later arrived in Herefordshire and it was her last wish that they should be buried with her.

A distant relative made a complaint that the remains had been moved.

Jim Dunstan, prosecuting, said the issue was that human remains should not be removed from their resting place without authority. The case was based around a law dealing with burials dating from 1857.

The judge, Recorder David Mason, QC, said he had decided to quash the case because he did not think a jury could be properly convinced by the evidence.

He said the contents of the box, which included a skull, bones and a certificate in Spanish authenticating the remains, had not been analysed.

As Witold had died so long ago, noone could be sure they were human remains.

After the case, Father Jasinski said he was unsure himself whether the remains were Witold's but it did not make a difference to his decision to remove them.

Zofia died in 1995 and he had been asked by a relative to remove the remains in 2002 because they could otherwise have ended up as landfill when the site was developed.

As the head of the Marian Fathers order based at the site, he said he had spent a long time considering it because he didn't know how it should be done.

The remains – which once attracted pilgrims to the site – were found in a box in a wall in the garden of the former convent.

“It was overgrown and we had trouble finding it. It had been many years since people had visited,” he said.

“Common sense tells me removing the remains was the right thing to do.

It was his mother's last wish. If I had not done it, I would have been wrong.”

He said he did not think Witold was still a likely candidate for sainthood but the publicity surrounding the case had brought his story once again into the spotlight.