ST JOHN’S, Antigua (AP) – A teenaged girl who gave a videotaped interview accusing Prime Minister Lester Bird of having sex with her, filed a lawsuit Thursday charging the island’s leader with statutory rape, abduction, conspiracy and sexual assault.

Bird, who was cleared two weeks ago by a government-ordered investigation on the basis of lack of evidence, is being sued along with his younger brother, Ivor Bird, said Beverly Percival, a secretary in the prime minister’s office.

Monique Kim Barua, who was 12 at the time of the alleged incidents, charges in her lawsuit that the prime minister sexually assaulted her between June 2000 and July 2001 in the northeast village of Parham, according to the suit.

Bird again rejected the lawsuit’s claims, repeating that he had never met the girl.

“I’m not surprised. I’m not worried,” Bird said, adding that the charges “cannot be sustained.”

Barua, who is now 15, filed the suit jointly with her mother, Jacqueline Fiedtkou, in the High Court of Justice of Antigua and Barbuda. No hearing date has been set.

The girl’s whereabouts, however, were unknown. A report two weeks ago said she left Antigua earlier this year. She was not interviewed in the investigation.

Thursday’s lawsuit also claims Barua was “victimised” by Bird and “corrupted into immoral and illegal conduct and behaviour and has lost a fair opportunity to develop as a normal adolescent”.

Charlesworth Brown, one of the lawyers for Barua and her mother, declined to give details about the charges, saying “the action was filed and I’ve no other comment to make”.

Barua first made her allegations in a four-hour videotaped interview made public in May. The video has since been copied and circulated throughout the island.

The girl – who said she holds a Guyanese passport and was born in Suriname on May 15, 1987 – claimed in the interview that she met Bird and his younger brother, Ivor Bird, at a party in 1999 and had a sexual relationship first with Ivor Bird and then with the prime minister.

She also alleged she made payments for cocaine deals on behalf of the prime minister, his brother, and governing party senator, Asot Michael. Bird has denied involvement, and the investigation report said there was no evidence against him or Michael.

The report said, however, that Ivor Bird “was having an inappropriate relationship” with the girl.

Bird has since filed a defamation lawsuit against Barua, the journalists who conducted the interview, and the Observer Media group that produced the interview.

“I don’t even know the girl,” Bird said Thursday. “It is an attempt to keep the accusations alive. I welcome her to come to Antigua so we can serve our writ on her.”