Ian Huntley was charged with rape several years before he was accused of the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, his Old Bailey trial heard yesterday.

Huntley was accused of the rape in 1998 but was acquitted when the case came to court, his ex-girlfriend Maxine Carr told police after they were both arrested on suspicion of the murder of the Soham schoolgirls.

She told police she had lied to protect Huntley, saying she was in Soham with him on the day the girls went missing, when in fact she was in Grimsby.

She did it because he had suffered a nervous breakdown after the rape accusation and feared he would be "fitted up" again, she said.

The former caretaker at Soham Village College, in Cambridgeshire, told his then girlfriend that she was to tell the truth about where she really was on August 4, 2002, if they were ever arrested, she claimed.

The jury heard that Huntley and Carr were both arrested on August 17, and that Carr was interviewed later that day, when she admitted she was in Grimsby and not in Soham when the girls vanished.

She told police: "The reason why I told the police that I was at home was because my partner, Ian, was accused in 1998 of attacking a girl, raping a girl.

"It went to court, he was put in a prison and bail hostel and then the police after so many months came up with this video tape of him in a nightclub at the time that it was supposed to have happened and he was acquitted.

"He had a nervous breakdown and everything else and when I found out that he was the last person to see them at that time, to speak to them, I just didn't know what to do."

She said she had not wanted to see Huntley accused in the Press and had lied for him, adding: "I'm sorry if I've wasted time and all that."

Carr said Huntley had telephoned her in Grimsby on Monday August 5 "in absolute tears".

She told police: "He said 'I'm going to get fitted up again like I did before', cos it took the police four months to come up with this video tape that they'd had all the time.

"He had a nervous breakdown and I just couldn't see him going through that again 'cos I know he hadn't done anything like that and I didn't want him to go through that again, being interrogated and having it thrown at him."

Huntley, 29, denies the double murder of the schoolgirls but has admitted one charge of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

Carr, 26, a former teaching assistant at the girls' primary school, denies the conspiracy charge and two counts of assisting an offender.

On Tuesday, Huntley's lawyer revealed that his client claims Holly drowned in the bath, and that Jessica died after he tried to silence her screams.

Yesterday, before Carr's interviews were read out, the jury heard a pathologist cast doubt on Huntley's account of how the girls died.

Home Office pathologist Dr Nat Cary said it was "unlikely at the least" Holly could have drowned in Huntley's bath as a result of a fall.

He also expressed surprise that there was no evidence of Holly's blood on her top or elsewhere if she had gone to the bathroom because of a severe nosebleed, as Huntley claims.

Dr Cary also questioned Huntley's account of how Jessica lost consciousness as he tried to stop her screaming.

He said: "In my view, the only way in which she could have been smothered to death would have been through forced restraint against vigorous struggling."

The pathologist said that the amount of "vigorous struggling" would make it obvious to the other person what was happening.

The jury has heard that Huntley admits putting the two lifeless ten-year-olds into his Ford Fiesta and driving them to the remote ditch near Lakenheath, Suffolk, where their bodies were found 13 days later, after Huntley and Carr were arrested.

The trial judge, Mr Justice Moses, reminded the jury that Carr's interviews were important evidence as to her state of mind and to her case, but should not be treated as evidence for or against Huntley.

The case continues.