A Cyprus court’s acquittal of five men accused of abducting and raping a British woman in the resort of Ayia Napa has been met with outrage as calls mount for the verdict to be challenged.

Dismissing the charges on Monday, the three-member district court in Paralimni ruled the testimony of the 20-year-old had not been credible because it “lacked coherence and contained numerous substantial contradictions”. The defendants, Israelis aged between 19 and 20, claimed sexual contact with the woman had been consensual.

But her lawyer, Michael Polak, described the assertion as absurd. “The young lady in this case is gay, any suggestion that she voluntarily agreed to group sex with men she had never met before, who were speaking in a different language, is ridiculous,” he told the Guardian. “She has been left completely distraught by the court’s verdict today. It was one of the hardest phone calls I have ever had to make.”

In February, another British woman who also claimed she had been gang-raped in Ayia Napa by more than a dozen Israeli men in July 2019 won a “monumental victory” over Cypriot authorities after the Strasbourg-based tribunal ruled they had “failed in their obligation to effectively investigate the applicant’s complaint of rape”.