AN EAST Lancashire charity worker has gone on trial in Albania accused of sexually abusing orphans.

Dino Christodoulou, 44, from Blackburn, faces 20 years in jail if convicted.

Friends in East Lancashire said that the trial in Albania had started well with one of the two main prosecution witnesses apparently changing his story and denying that Christodoulou ever abused him.

His friend and former colleague Rev Bernard Cocker, who runs the International Aid Trust, in Much Hoole near Preston, said he had been encouraged with the way the case has started.

Rev Cocker, who worked with Christodoulou in the 1990s on several charity projects, said: “It has been a positive start.

"This is a very worrying time for everyone who knows Dino.

“My position remains that I would stake his life on Dino being innocent.”

Christodoulou is being tried in a closed court in the Albanian capital of Tirana and was extradited earlier this year.

It is expected that the trial will continue for several more weeks.

He was arrested last October following an investigation launched in 2006 after allegations made by six orphans aged between six and 13.

He and Robin Arnold, 55, of Norfolk, were working as helpers at the ‘His Children’ refuge in Tirana, where it is alleged they molested orphans in 2004.

A third man, David Brown, 56, formerly of Edinburgh, who is said to have set up the home, is already being held in Albania awaiting the court case.

The trio are facing a maximum of 20 years in jail.

Friends in East Lancashire are running a ‘Dino is innocent’ campaign and have stood by the former social therapy nurse.

Christodoulou was heralded as a charity champion after helping a number of causes in the 1990s.

In 1996, he won a bravery award for disarming a gunman who shot a woman in the stomach in King Street, Whalley.

Six years later he left for Albania, telling the Lancashire Telegraph he was “on a mission to help the needy in Eastern Europe”.

He quit his job at the former Queen’s Park Hospital and sold his possessions to ‘help orpans and those living on the streets’.