TEENAGER Kelly Morris today said she was relieved that a four year battle through the courts is over, despite losing her claim for damages.

The 19-year-old, who was indecently assaulted while she was asleep on a KLM flight from Kuala Lumpur to Amsterdam in 1998, had her appeal rejected by the House of Lords yesterday.

This means she is now left without a penny in damages against the airline.

She said today: "I am not getting upset over it. I am just relieved that it is all over and done with.

"It has been a long four year fight through the courts.

"I think I have made my point. At first KLM said that this would not reach the courts.

"But it not only went before the courts, it went to the House of Lords.

"I'm just ready to put it all behind me and get on with my life."

The Law Lords dismissed her appeal against an earlier ruling of the Court of Appeal that she could not make a claim because she had suffered no bodily injury.

Miss Morris, who suffered a depressive disorder following the incident, was just 15 in September 1998 when she boarded a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight to Amsterdam as an unaccompanied minor after visiting her uncle in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

She was seated next to two men who were speaking in French and when she fell asleep after a meal, she woke to find one of them fondling her.

Miss Morris initially won a ruling at Bury County Court that the airline was responsible under the Warsaw Convention covering air travel and she made a £10,000 damages claim against KLM.

KLM appealed, claiming that the convention only covers bodily injury and that Miss Morris had not been harmed physically.

The Law Lords ruled yesterday that a psychiatric condition developed by a passenger as a result of an incident on board an aircraft was not in itself a "bodily injury" within Article 17.

Lord Hope, dismissing the appeal, said that after the incident on board the flight Miss Morris became "very distressed" and went to see a doctor on her return.

"He found that she was suffering from a clinical depression amounting to a single episode of a major depressive illness. She has now made a full recovery."