by Keith Hunt

A father accused of kicking a friend in the head while wearing steel-capped boots has been cleared of a wounding charge.

Igoris Smirnovas suffered a fractured eye socket during a row with fellow Lithuanian Stanislovas Cemnickas on November 4 last year.

Cemnickas, 51, was alleged to have lashed out after Mr Smirnovas arrived home from an evening drinking with friends in Gravesend.

Maidstone Crown Court heard Cemnickas’s wife had been looking after Mr Smirnovas' five-year-old son while his wife picked him up from the town at about 11pm on November 4 last year.

When the couple arrived home, Cemnickas, of Elm Road, Gravesend, was said to be shouting and swearing at their front door.

Having asked Cemnickas to calm down, it was alleged that Mr Smirnovas was pushed to the ground and then kicked in the head. Police later found traces of Mr Smirnovas’ blood on his right boot.

But Cemnickas, a driver for Northfleet textile company Sunlight, denied kicking or punching Mr Smirnovas and a jury acquitted him of unlawful wounding.

Mr Smirnovas’s wife, Ceslava Smirnoveue,corrclaimed she saw Cemnickas hit her husband. He fell to the ground, she said, and was kicked in the head as he tried to get up.

Cemnickas, who came to the UK in 2003, claimed Mr Smirnovas attacked him and then fell down by his feet and landed on his face.

He said Mr Smirnovas was really drunk and at first did not appear to know him. Mr Smirnovas, he said, grabbed his clothes. He tried to avoid him by running around his car.

But Cemnickas claimed the other man caught him, grabbed him with one hand and punched him with the other. Cemnickas said he did not retaliate.

“I didn’t use my hands against him at all,” he told jurors. “He landed on his face near my feet. I didn’t kick him in the head with a steel-capped boot.”