A divorced father abducted his young son and fled with him from Somerset to America, a court heard yesterday

The man, from Yeovil, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had surrendered the child’s passport to his mother because of fears that he might take the boy to America, but obtained a second passport by claiming that the first had been lost.

Taunton Crown Court was told yesterday that once in the US, the father used another document which appeared to show that a Somerset court had ordered the boy to live with him. But the judge whose signature was on the document was dead and no such order had been made.

Yesterday, the father denied making an untrue statement for the purposes of procuring a passport on October 29, 2008, and abducting a child under the age of 16, taking him out of the UK without consent on November 15 the same year. The defendant, who is representing himself, declined to appear in court but a trial carried on in his absence.

Judge Graham Hume Jones warned the jury that the fact that the father would not appear in person should not be held against him. Miss Fiona Elder told the court that a joint residency order was made on July 10, 2007, which set out the boy’s living arrangements.

The order clearly stated that it would be an offence to take the boy out of the UK without the written consent of people responsible for the child or the leave of the court.

The father had given the boy’s passport to his mother in September 2006 and the mother told the court she kept it in a security box at her home.

But on November 17, 2007, she became worried when the boy did not return from a visit, and after failing to get a response to telephone calls went to her ex-husband’s house.

The mother told the court: “I thought maybe they were ill, so I called my partner and we drove to the house. All the curtains were drawn so I went to the front. Everything was shut. We went straight to the police station to report him missing.”

Miss Elder said security cameras at Bristol Airport were checked and they showed the pair passing through security control. Film capturing the moment was shown to the jury.

Father and son were eventually traced to Philadelphia and the mother was reunited with her son in the US last summer. She returned to Somerset with him.

The father was held in custody in the US awaiting extradition. Detective Sergeant Scott Chadwick travelled to the US on October 6 last year to bring him home, and formally arrested him on the flight home on October 8. The man was interviewed and charged at Yeovil police station.

Miss Elder told the jury: “This wasn’t a spontaneous action. He had obtained this passport and furthermore had a document purporting to be a residency order from this country.”