November 2010 Swansea pensioner is jailed for 19 years for child abuse crimes A SWANSEA pensioner has been sent to prison for 19 years for serious sex crimes against six children. Jose Ponce, 72, raped four young girls in the 1970s and 1980s. Then, in the 1990s, he indecently assaulted a boy and a girl. The jury at his trial also heard how he made threats to his victims to prevent them from reporting him to the police. Ponce, of Caerphilly Avenue, Winch Wen, and formerly of Ffordd y Brain, Fforesthall, targeted his victims after settling in Swansea as a refugee from Chile. He pleaded not guilty at Swansea Crown Court, but was convicted after a three-week trial of offences involving five girls and a boy. The jury of six men and six women cleared him of an indecent assault allegation involving another young girl some 30 years ago. Following the verdicts, Judge Keith Thomas told Ponce: “Offences of this sort carry only one kind of sentence — imprisonment.” Imposing a jail sentence of 19 years, the judge said the prison term would have been even longer if Ponce had been younger. “These are offences of such gravity, committed against people of such a young age, that were it not for your age it would be necessary to go outside the range of sentences suggested by the sentencing guidelines council,” he told Ponce yesterday. One of the aggravating features of the case, said Judge Thomas, was the large number of young victims. Another was the way Ponce had made “serious and frightening” threats to prevent his victims from reporting his behaviour. During the trial, prosecutor Elwen Evans QC described how Ponce had engaged in a “catalogue of offending” over many years to satisfy his sexual gratification. A police investigation was launched last December after the male victim in the case — now in his 20s — told detectives how he had been molested by the defendant in the 1990s. “That complaint result- ed in others being prepared to revisit the past and tell the police what had happened to them at the defendant’s hands,” said Miss Evans. Two of Ponce’s female victims are now in their 40s, two are in their 30s and one is in her 20s. The one complainant Ponce was cleared of indecently assaulting is also in her 40s. When Ponce was arrested in March this year he said the allegations against him were “all lies” – and he repeated this assertion when giving evidence last month from the witness box. Speaking in Spanish through an interpreter, he denied any wrong-doing and described each of his seven accusers as a liar. “All they have done is told lies,” he claimed. “But I have told the truth and I want you to believe me.” At the end of yesterday’s hearing, Judge Thomas directed that Ponce must be registered as a sex offender for the rest of his life.