A 68-YEAR-OLD man jailed for sexually abusing his granddaughter must remain behind bars despite the teenager now saying she made it up "for attention".

The girl, now 17, has claimed that she lied at his trial, where she was the main witness against him in January last year.

Her grandfather is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence after a jury at Snaresbrook Crown Court found him guilty in February of last year.

But on Friday, senior judges ruled that evidence given by the "fragile and troubled teenager" was still reliable - and that her retraction was "demonstrably unreliable".

The teen, who is know as M in legal proceedings as she can't be named, first made the allegations to a counsellor in 2016 when she was 14, The Times reports.

M told the counsellor that she realised that her grandfather’s behaviour was wrong only after attending sex education classes at school when she was in Year 8.

The counsellor then reported the account to the police, who interviewed M the following day.

Three months later the grandfather faced charges of abusing the girl on several occasions, when she was three or four, six or seven and eight or nine years old.

The teen's mother also gave evidence at his trial, and was forced to deny that she had prompted her daughter to make the allegations because of her personal dislike of her father-in-law.

He was convicted by a majority of 11 to 1, but an appeal was lodged three months later on the grounds that his granddaughter had given false evidence at the trial.

M retracted the allegations in a legal statement supported by her mother, saying she was “shocked and horrified to discover that my grandfather was not only convicted but had gone to prison".

She added: "This was never my intention and was not what was supposed to happen. I was just supposed to get attention and that would be it.”

But the Court of Appeal, led by Lord Justice Davis, rejected the appeal, saying there was "no proper basis" for rejecting M's original evidence.

He said it was impossible to rule out that M had "been subject to direct pressure, following sentence, from family members", adding: "We reject the veracity and reliability of her subsequent retraction statement, put in after sentence was announced."