Police regularly sift through the red light districts of Bangkok, the notorious
beach town of Pattaya and the island of Phuket for Westerners police in their
home countries had issued warnings about, said Major-General Wimol Powintara,
head of the child crime police.
Major-General Wimol Powintara, head of the child crime police, talks to Reuters
in Bangkok October 24, 2007. Thai police, who ended a global manhunt with the
arrest of a Canadian paedophile suspect last week, are looking for dozens more
foreign suspects, mostly Germans, who may be hiding in the country, Wimol said.
(REUTERS/Chaiwat Subprasom)
"These are men, young and old, who love to have sex with little boys," Wimol
told Reuters as he flipped through a folder of photographs of 50 white males
supplied by the German police about a year ago along with their names and dates
of birth.
"I have no objection if they have sex with anyone aged over 18, but don't do it
on our little children who are the future of our country," Wimol said in an
interview at his office where 200 officers deal with crimes against children
and women nationwide.
Wimol said these paedophiles were quite discreet when looking for children,
hiring adult males or transvestites as go-betweens to lure children to their
rooms by promising free computer games and easy money.
The most difficult part of putting suspects behind bars was to convince abused
children to testify against the suspected paedophiles, Wimol said.
"Without the cooperation of the children, police can't prosecute these
paedophiles," Wimol said.
A case in point was that of Christopher Neil, a Canadian accused of raping
young boys in Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia and posting photos of his sex on
the Internet.
After a three-year hunt involving cutting edge technology and police on three
continents, Neil, 32, was arrested in a dusty town, 250 km northeast of
Bangkok, last week and will be charged with molesting underage children in
Thailand.
Neil denies accusations that could land him in jail for 20 years and one
teenager soon alleged the Canadian had paid him for oral sex.
But it took police days to convince a second teenager to say Neil paid him
500-1,000 baht ($15-$30) for each act of oral sex and put together a solid case
against him, Wimol said.
Even if the abused children did cooperate, suspects were often freed on bail
and paid them not to show up in court or change their testimonies, police said.
"With their influence and money, it is almost impossible to put them in jail,"
said one of Wimol's officers who declined to be identified.
Paedophiles have long headed to Thailand, a largely conservative,
overwhelmingly Buddhist country where a large sex industry draws thousands upon
thousands of foreigners among whom it is easy to hide, as well as other
Southeast Asian countries.
Last year, Thai police launched a manhunt for JonBenet Ramsey murder suspect
John Mark Karr, found in possession of child pornography in the United States.
Karr, who worked as an English teacher, was arrested in a run-down Bangkok
hostel and sent back to the United States, where he was eventually cleared of
any involvement in Ramsey's murder, one of America's most infamous unsolved
crimes.
Reuters
