Bingo! We’ve Got Him, Say Jubilant Police On Trail Of Paedophile In Scrambled Photo

Wearing a baggy T-shirt and sunglasses and with a week’s worth of stubble, the world’s most wanted paedophile suspect was arrested and paraded in public in Thailand yesterday.

Christopher Neil, who is accused of abusing more than a dozen children in three Asian countries and was the subject of a three-year global manhunt, was arrested in the northeastern province of Nakhon Ratchasima after Thai police received a tip-off.

“Bingo! We’ve got him,” Major-General Wimol Powintara said when he announced the arrest.

Police said that Mr Neil, 32, a Canadian teacher, had been staying with a transvestite friend. “I think he knew we were coming,” said Paisal Luesomboon, a policeman who was in the five-man team that made the arrest. “He knew that there was an arrest warrant issued and that his face was posted everywhere.”

He said that Mr Neil acknowledged his name and nationality, but would not say whether he was the man pictured in hundreds of internet photographs apparently having sex with boys as young as 6 in Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand.

A warrant was issued for the arrest on Thursday, based on the testimony of a boy who said that he was lured to Mr Neil’s apartment in Bangkok by a Thai man. Police established that the child was one of at least three Thai boys aged between 9 and 14 who had been sexually abused. He is also believed to have abused a dozen Vietnamese and Cambodian boys.

Mr Neil, in handcuffs and with a blue shirt draped over his face, was driven to Bangkok, where he faced the media horde gathered at the national police headquarters. He was charged with detention of a child under 15 without parental consent, taking a child under 15 from his parents without consent and sexual abuse of a child under 15. If found guilty, he could be jailed for 20 years.

It was a fitting end to a manhunt that involved police forces in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos and an unprecedented international appeal from Interpol.

The hunt began three years ago when German police discovered about 200 photos on the internet of a man sexually abusing young Asian boys. But the man’s face had been digitally scrambled and it was only 11 days ago that German police were finally able to reconstruct an identifiable image of the man who had eluded them for so long.

The man was not on any Interpol or national police database, and extensive inquiries by Interpol failed to turn up any leads. So it made an international web appeal for information that might help them to identify the man in the photographs.

Michael Moran, an Interpol case officer based in Bangkok, said: “We simply went to the people, and asked the people to help us find this man. And that was successful.”

About 350 people responded to Interpol’s appeal and within days Mr Neil, who was teaching English in South Korea, had been named by five sources on three continents.

One week ago, Neil was caught on CCTV camera arriving in Bangkok. Alerted by Interpol, the police then trawled transvestite hangouts in the Patpong red-light district and the seaside town of Pattaya, where he had been seen with a 25-year-old cross-dresser called Ohm.

Police traced Ohm’s real name on Thailand’s national database of citizens, found that he came from the province of Chaiyaphume and got his telephone number. Phone records allowed them to chart the pair’s progress from Pattaya to Chaiyaphume and Nakhon Ratchasima.

Although Canadian authorities have said that they will seek Mr Neil’s extradition, the Royal Thai Police were triumphant. “We have a message for the international media,” Lieutenant-General Ponsapat Pongcharoen said. “We take the abuse of our children very seriously.The charges he faces can bring him a sentence of five to 20 years in jail.”

Mr Moran said: “This has been a triumph of cooperation. The Thai police have performed exceptionally well. But the investigation will continue in Vietnam and Cambodia.”

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