Nearly all potential criminal charges faced by former National Coalition Party secretary Harri Jaskari have been dropped.
District prosecutor Jouni Peräinen did not find probable cause to charge Jaskari with three assaults, three illegal threats, and pimping.
Only one charge of an illegal threat remains. Peräinen says that Jaskari made the threat in the apartment of his former girlfriend in Tampere in October 2004.
Jaskari denies the charges.
Peräinen will not say before the trial how this event differs from the other suspected illegal threats, which he is not pressing charges on.
In those cases the woman claimed that Jaskari had threatened to hurt her with a knife.
The decision not to press charges on most of the other accusations indicates that other suspicions were based purely on the woman's claims.
The most serious charge involved pimping. It was based on the first interrogation of Jaskari's former girlfriends. She said that she had told Jaskari that she was working as an erotic masseuse in his Helsinki apartment.
She said that Jaskari had agreed to her suggestion that she would earn the money to pay back a debt that she owed to the party secretary at the time.
In subsequent interrogations, the woman changed her story and insisted that Jaskari did not know what was going on.
The woman would not back down on her claims that she had been physically attacked by Jaskari. She showed police a photograph in which she and Jaskari appear with black eyes during a trip to Spain. However, there were no outside witnesses to the event.
A second suspected attack was dropped because of contradictory statements that the woman made to her doctor. During the first visit she said that she had been abused by her male companion. During a second visit she said that the injuries were the result of an accident. The third alleged assault was backed up exclusively by the woman's own statement.
Commenting on the prosecutor's decision, Jaskari, who is running for Parliament in elections in March, said that he felt great relief.
