A man has been cleared of groping a woman on a public bus, after the Chief Justice agreed it could be a case of mistaken identity.

Nirmalan Anandacoomarasamy, 35, was convicted last September of sexually assaulting the complainant on the Number 7 South Shore service, and sentenced to a month behind bars.

He spent one night in jail before his lawyer Mark Pettingill launched an appeal.

His trial had heard how the woman picked him out of a Police line up after his arrest, but Chief Justice Richard Ground yesterday agreed with Mr. Pettingill that her evidence could not be relied upon, as she gave the culprit on the bus little more than a fleeting glance.

The Sri Lankan national was declared by Mr. Pettingill to be "very happy" and "breathing a sigh of relief" at the acquittal, with the lawyer adding "I'm really very pleased indeed, I feel there could have been a real grave miscarriage of justice on the identification in this case."

He had previously pointed out that Mr. Anandacoomarasamy, a guest worker living in Southampton, lost his job as an accountant at BISYS as a result of the case and faced deportation if the conviction was upheld.

"His job is something he'll have to address with his former employers and decide whether he's willing to stay or to leave Bermuda. I think he's likely to leave, and who can blame him," Mr. Pettingill remarked yesterday.

During the trial the victim, aged in her 50s, told Magistrates' Court that a man touched her leg three times after taking a seat next to her on the bus on December 22 2006.

She explained that she was dozing after the bus left Hamilton depot around 4 pm. She initially felt something rubbing her leg by her knee, then further up her leg - but dismissed the incidents as the result of her dreaming or perhaps being tickled by an insect.

However, she next felt something rubbing her on the thigh, close to her vagina - and saw the man next to her had his hand on the top of her thigh.

The woman - who cannot be identified for legal reasons - said she told passengers on the bus twice that the man had assaulted her, but was ignored. The culprit got off the bus at Warwick Camp.

The victim did not report the incident at first, but did so several weeks later as a result of publicity about a sex pest targeting female bus passengers. She picked Anandacoomarasamy, a Sri Lankan national, out during an ID parade on February 7 2007.

The defendant protested his innocence, saying he was not the man on the bus and was at work at the time. Launching an appeal against the conviction at Supreme Court last month, Mr. Pettingill claimed the victim scarcely glanced at the culprit.

He also pointed to evidence from the woman during the trial that she was dozing as the incident unfolded. Anandacoomarasamy, he told the Chief Justice, was the victim of a "ghastly" case of mistaken identity.

He said Senior Magistrate Archibald Warner failed to properly apply the correct legal principles relating to identification evidence.

In yesterday's ruling, Mr. Justice Ground said: "What it comes down to is whether the learned Senior Magistrate was right in his assessment of the quality of the identification evidence. This has nothing to do with the quite separate question of whether he was right to believe the complainant.

"There was no suggestion that she was not telling the truth to the best of her ability, and in any event this court would rarely intervene where an assessment of credibility was involved. The question is whether there was such a risk that she might be mistaken as to render it unsafe to rely on her identification of the appellant."

He noted: "In this case, the prosecution case against the appellant at trial turned solely on the identification evidence of the complainant. There was nothing in the evidence to support or corroborate her."

It was up to the prosecution, he said, to disprove Mr. Anandacoomarasamy's alibi that he was at work at the time of the incident, noting: "In any event, the lapse of time between the incident and the complaint would necessarily make it very difficult for someone in the ordinary course of things to produce alibi witnesses."

The defendant was originally on trial for assaulting another woman in similar circumstances on December 14 2006. That charge was dismissed by Mr. Warner on the grounds of flawed identification evidence because that woman saw a photo of Mr. Anandacoomarasamy before the ID parade.

Mr. Justice Ground commented: "It is true that the evidence of multiple complainants can properly be used to support each other...but if the evidence of one is tainted (as it was in this case) then it would be unsafe to rely upon it for this purpose."

He concluded: "Against that background, the quality of the identification evidence in this case was, in my judgment, insufficient on its own to support a conviction. It was little more than a fleeting glance.

"The complainant had been in a dozy state for much of the time. There was nothing to support the identification. There was a delay between the incident and the formal identification, and the description the complainant gave of the assailant differed from that of the appellant at the time of the identification parade."

Mr. Pettingill pointed out after the ruling that his client was not arrested until more than two months after the last allegation of a sex pest targeting bus travellers was reported, and said he has heard of no similar complaints since.

Mr. Anandacoomarasamy declined to comment.