A registered sex offender who was jailed in 2006 after a tipster wrongfully accused him of murdering kidnap victim Gina DeJesus wants an apology from the city of Cleveland.

“I’m happy they’re home and safe,” Matthew Hurayt said of DeJesus, and fellow kidnap victims Michele Knight and Amanda Berry, who were rescued by a neighbor Monday after years of captivity.

But Hurayt, whose home was searched in 2006 with TV cameras and a crowd of spectators watching, said there are still injustices connected to the case that need righting. “I want justice for the men that really did it, (the tipster) locked up and the city of Cleveland to make a public apology,” he said.

Hurayt, whose criminal record includes a conviction for sexual battery of two children, told NBC News that on Sept. 21, 2006, he and roommate John McDonough were arrested after a tipster said that he had raped and killed DeJesus and buried her under his new garage.

“The police jumped on that and plastered me all over the news,” said Hurayt.

Hurayt and McDonough were held for several days in the Cleveland City Jail on suspicion of the aggravated murder of DeJesus, who vanished in 2004. As a crowd gathered, police and FBI agents searched the house for 10 hours. They dug under his garage with a backhoe and chopped the cement floor into sections, and dug under the structure. They also dug under a dog house.

Authorities said that cadaver dogs had “indicated” at several places on the property, and they removed a number of items from the house for further investigation. But they found nothing tying Hurayt to the disappearance of DeJesus or that of Amanda Berry, who got into a strange car in 2003 and never came home.

Slideshow: Missing women found alive in Cleveland

Tony Dejak / AP

A daring escape and a dramatic 911 call led to the rescue of three women who allegedly had been held captive for years inside a home in Cleveland, Ohio.

Launch slideshow

“We're disappointed that the search wasn't as fruitful as we hoped,” police Lt. Thomas Stacho told the Cleveland Plain Dealer at the time. “But we would have been remiss if we didn't investigate this lead.” An FBI agent told the DeJesus family, which had already been notified of a possible break in the case, that nothing had been found, the paper said.

After Hurayt spent a weekend in jail, a judge ordered him released on Sept. 25, 2006, rejecting an assistant county prosecutor’s request to increase his bond on an unrelated assault case. Hurayt’s lawyer, Mark Marein, compared the search for remains on his client’s property to the search for Jimmy Hoffa.

Hurayt filed a claim for compensation for $20,000 in damages to Hurayt’s property with the city’s Moral Claims Commission, but it was rejected, said Marein.

Hurayt was required to register as a sex offender because of his sexual battery conviction. He was also convicted in the 2006 assault case, and served time in prison. After he was released in 2010, according to Hurayt, locals remembered that his home had been searched for DeJesus’s remains and continued to think he had some connection to the case. According to Hurayt, in the past three years people have broken his windows, set fire to his garage and harassed him with phone calls.

Marein said that his client was harassed on a daily basis. “He literally could not walk down the street without people busting his chops.”

Related story

Thirteen years, three victims, one shared horror: What we know so far

Marein said the first telephone call he got Tuesday morning was from Hurayt. “It was, ‘I told you so.’ He wore that scarlet letter for a long time.”

According to Marein, Hurayt filed police reports detailing some of the incidents of harassment, but police “turned a blind eye.”

Public information officers for the Cleveland Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

More from Open Channel:

• Special Forces team wasn't allowed to fly to Benghazi during consulate attack
• Texas fertilizer plant was repeat target of theft, tampering
• Foreclosure compensation checks arrive, but anger some homeowners

Follow Open Channel from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook 

Marvin Fong / The Plain Dealer

David Ayers, center, walks out of the Justice Center as a free man, Monday, Sept. 12, 2011. Ayers, who was serving time for murder, had his charges dropped because of DNA testing that did not trace back to him. Carrie Wood, from the Innocence Project, leads him outside.

A man who spent 11 years in prison on a murder conviction that was later reversed has won a $13.2 million award in a civil rights lawsuit against the city of Cleveland.

A federal jury found Friday that two Cleveland detectives fabricated or withheld evidence in the 2000 trial of David Ayers, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported.

Ayers was convicted of aggravated murder in the Dec. 17, 1999, beating death of Dorothy Brown, a 76-year-old woman who lived in a high-rise run by the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority. Ayers was a resident of the same complex and a security guard for the housing authority, according to court documents.

He was arrested in March 2000 and convicted late that year.

He maintained his innocence, and after the Ohio Innocence Project took up his case in 2008, Ayers got a state appeals court to order the trial judge to allow DNA testing of a single pubic hair found on Brown’s body – the results of which showed the hair did not come from Ayers.

But while the hair was being tested, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed his conviction (read the decision here in PDF), saying the trial judge improperly allowed testimony of a jailhouse informant who said Ayers confessed to killing the victim and stealing money from her.

Ayers was freed in 2011.

One detective settled with Ayers out of court. But in the civil rights trial, the Plain Dealer reported, Ayers’ lawyers said two other detectives, Denise Kovach and Michael Cipo, had tried to frame Ayers because he was gay – despite evidence that Brown had also been sexually assaulted.

According to The Associated Press:

Among the most serious allegations by Ayers against Kovach and Cipo were that the two detectives conspired with each other to fabricate a confession that he never made, coerced a friend of Ayers to lie by saying that Ayers had told him of the murder before Brown's body was discovered, and gave key information about the crime to Ayers' prison cellmate so he could later testify against Ayers about an admission he didn't make.

The detectives had denied any wrongdoing.

After the civil rights verdict, The Plain Dealer reported, the director of Cleveland's law office said the city was "considering our options."

As for Ayers, the newspaper quoted him as saying: "My goal is that it never happens to anyone else ever again."