The Power of the Paedos - another high profile case hits the 'never happened' wall?

[Magda Hassan]

Sex Abuse Scandal: German Catholic Church Cancels Inquiry

By Barbara Hans
An independent inquiry into sex abuse in the German Catholic Church was supposed to restore faith in the embattled institution. But now the Church has called it off, citing a breakdown in trust with the researchers.

[URL="http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/bild-876612-445244.html"]
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"The relationship of mutual trust between the bishops and the head of the institute has been destroyed," said the Bishop of Trier, Stephan Ackermann.



It was a major promise after a major disaster: In summer 2011, the Catholic Church in Germany pledged full transparency. One year earlier, an abuse scandal had shaken the country's faithful, as an increasing number of cases surfaced in which priests had sexually abused children and then hidden behind a wall of silence.

ANZEIGE

The Lower Saxony Criminological Research Institute (KFN) was given the job of investigating the cases in 2011. The personnel files from churches in all 27 dioceses were to be examined for cases of abuse in an attempt to win back some of the Church's depleted credibility.But now the Church has called off the study, citing a breakdown in trust. "The relationship of mutual trust between the bishops and the head of the institute has been destroyed," said the Bishop of Trier, Stephan Ackermann, on Wednesday morning.
The director of the KFN, Christian Pfeiffer, told SPIEGEL ONLINE that the Church had refused to cooperate. At the end of last year, he contacted the dioceses twice in writing. He reminded them of their promised transparency and cooperation. He also asked them whether there was any indication that in some dioceses files had been actively destroyed.
The Bishops' Conference, the country's official body of the Church, was apparently unable to agree on any form of cooperation with the KFN.
The controversy in recent months centered on privacy and data protection: various dioceses have refused to issue documents, allegedly fearing that the anonymity of those affected would not be maintained and that sensitive information could potentially be made public. In response, Pfeiffer asserted in April 2012 that the perpetrator files "never left the church space made available by the Vicar General." A meeting with the indignant clergy around that time was unsuccessful.
Criticism for the Church
German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger has defended the KFN's professional credibility and demanded that the issue be cleared up. "The accusation that censorship and the desire to maintain control hindered an independent examination must quickly be resolved by the Bishops' Conference," she told the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung on Wednesday, urging the Church to conduct a thorough investigation of the abuse scandal.
"It is a necessary and overdue step for the Catholic Church to open up its archives to specialists outside the Church for the first time," she said. "The dramatic shock of 2010 must not be allowed to trickle off into a half-hearted inquiry."
Before the inquiry was called off, the spokesman for the German Bishops' Conference, Matthias Kopp, had insisted that the project should continue regardless of the outcome of the conflict: "Should cooperation with the KFN fall through, there would be a continuation of the project with another partner," he said.
Pfeiffer insists that the church did not uphold their end of the agreement, which was signed by the research institute and the Association of German Dioceses (VDD). Debate broke out about whether individual dioceses were contractually bound by the agreement.
The structure of the study was unique in Europe: All 27 dioceses had wanted to grant the KFN access to their complete personnel files from the past ten years. In nine dioceses, the investigation was to have gone back as far as 1945.
Unanswered Questions
The German Bishops' Conference reached the agreement with the KFN on June 20, 2011. Under the supervision of a team of KFN researchers, church officials were to examine the files for indications of sexual assault. Retired prosecutors and judges would carry out much of the work to evaluate files that were found to be suspicious.
The German Bishops' Conference hoped the examination would answer three questions: Under what circumstances was the abuse allowed to happen? How has the Church dealt with these actions? And what can be done to prevent future acts? The research project was scheduled to last three years and was also meant to examine how offender profiles have changed in recent years.

The project was of incalculable importance to the Catholic Church, because the loss of confidence after the abuse scandal was enormous. The cancellation of the inquiry throws into high relief Bishop Ackermann's statement from 2011: "We also want the truth, which may still lie hidden in decades-old files, to be uncovered."Early on there was criticism of the project, though. The conservative Network of Catholic Priests pointed out that "even according to normal labor law, third parties are not entitled to claim personnel files."
The model for the study was a survey in Munich, where an attorney went through personnel files -- and identified nine more cases of abuse than had previously been discovered by the dioceses.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germ...76612.html

[Danny Jarman]

Child abuse cops seize VIP list: Politicians, MI5 agent, Royal aide and pop stars all named

19 Jan 2013 22:00 First arrests expected soon following dawn raid in connection with suburban guest house that operated as gay brothel


A list of names seized by police probing allegations of child abuse includes ministers, members of the royal household and a world-famous pop star, the Sunday People can reveal.


All were recorded as visitors to a suburban guest house that operated as a gay brothel.


Now some could be suspects in an investigation into a network of powerful people who were secret paedophiles for years.


Late last week police ramped up the inquiry and arrests are believed to be imminent.


Nine officers raided the North London home of former child protection worker Mary Moss after she initially declined to co-operate with the investigation.


Documents and a laptop were seized. Ms Moss later handed over a further 19 files she had hidden in a neighbour's shed.


The papers include a list of men who went to sex parties in the 80s at the Elm Guest House, Barnes, South West London.


Among the names are two former Conservative Cabinet ministers and four other senior Tories.


There is also a Labour MP, a prominent Irish republican and a leading National Front member.


Others on the handwritten note are two members of the royal household one a former Buckingham Palace employee plus the owner of a multinational company and two pop stars.


One of those is a best-selling musician, but like some others on the list he is not suspected of being involved in the child abuse.


The list was taken at meetings in 1988 between the guest house's manager Carole Kasir and child protection officials.


Other documents seized are believed to identify 16 boys who were allegedly trafficked to the guest house from local care homes. Police have asked Richmond Council for a full list of children in care at the time.


Officers will also be examining copies of cash receipts and *the guest house's visitor records.


Operation Fernbridge is investigating claims that boys who were in council care were brought to the Elm to be sexually abused by bigwigs and VIPs.


It was launched after Labour MP Tom Watson claimed a paedophile ring used top-level connections to dodge justice.


As well as Richmond, social services records from nearby Wandsworth, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Hounslow will be checked by detectives.


The first people to be arrested are not expected to be famous.


But sources close to the investigation are increasingly confident some big names will be caught in the police net.


Renowned figures linked to the scandal so far include the former Liberal MP Cyril Smith and the one-time Keeper of the Queen's Pictures Anthony Blunt, who was disgraced as a traitor and spy.


The Sunday People was the first to expose the "paedo palace" last month. Its owner Kasir was 47 when she died of a suspected overdose in 1990.


At her inquest, child protection workers told the coroner of her meetings with them two years earlier.


She reported that boys from nearby Grafton Close council home were *brought to her premises and abused.


The claim was never fully investigated by police. Kasir was at the Elm when cops raided a party there in 1982.


Twelve boys then told police they had been abused by men in the house but complaints were not pursued.


The only prosecution in the wake of the raid resulted in Kasir being convicted of keeping a brothel.


Campaigners believe she did not know of the child abuse until shortly before she reported it in 1988.


It appears a 2003 probe into activities at the Elm also fizzled out. Now Operation Fernbridge may be on the verge of bringing offenders to justice.
It was triggered by a speech Tom Watson made in the House of Commons.


He told MPs there was "clear intelligence" of an abuse network of powerful men with influence at the highest level in Parliament and even in Downing Street.

A lot of it was gathered in the 1992 investigation into paedophile Peter Righton.


The Met launched Operation Fairbank with a staff of five collecting intelligence on long-standing allegations.


After interviewing adult witnesses they started Operation Fernbridge to look solely at the Elm.


Ms Moss said of last week's police raid: "They were friendly enough but I thought it was heavy handed and a complete violation of my *privacy."


The Met said on Friday: "The investigation will be led by the Child Abuse Investigation Command.


"The allegations under Operation Fernbridge were initially assessed under Operation Fairbank, which was from information passed to police by Mr Tom Watson."
The MP said: "I believe a great injustice was done in the 1980s.


"To stop something like this happening again I am asking victims to summon the courage to come forward now.


"Whatever has happened in the past your voices will be heard now.


"You can contact the police. Or if you feel more comfortable you can contact me directly."

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/pol...wn-1546351

Makes me wonder if the UK will have a full scale dutroux style affair.

[Anthony Thorne]

On the subject of this thread, has anyone ever heard reference made to a character or figure called 'Brassman'? A friend of mine noted he'd seen the name mentioned by some Franklin Scandal victims in the Conspiracy of Silence documentary - with 'Brassman' being a predatory adult figure that some of the children had reportedly encountered - but when I scanned the documentary I couldn't see the name mentioned. If anyone has encountered the name 'Brassman' being recounted in discussions relating to abuse, please let me know, as it will help me join the dots in some other related areas of research.. Thanks for any help.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Gordon Thomas has excellent intelligence connections, particularly with Mossad.

Paedophiles, Cheb sex capital of Europe
Captive market: The sexual slave traffic in children
By Gordon Thomas
Sunday, October 8, 2006

It was dusk when the BMWs and Mercedes once more began to enter Cheb on Christmas Eve, 2004. By midnight, the expensive cars cruised its streets. The town is on the Czech-German border, a crossing point on the highway that leads to Prague from Bavaria and Saxony.
Cheb is a mecca for German paedophiles who come to this drab town, with its ugly Stalinist-era apartment blocks and poorly-lit back streets for one purpose.
Every night, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cheb has maintained its reputation as the child sex capital of Europe. These include what are known as "the specials": children so small, so vulnerable, so fragile, that they cannot solicit for themselves. They are offered to the drivers of those cars by their "keepers". This is the shame of Czechoslovakia, a country that now prides itself on having a future in the European Community.
For the equivalent of US $50 a paedophile can take his pick of children often barely out of their diapers.
They are the ultimate degradation for a town of 38,000 people. With over 100 brothels, no one knows exactly how many young prostitutes work in them or on the streets of Cheb.
On New Year's Day, 2004, Europe's newspapers reported the latest child-sex scandal. A former Portuguese cabinet minister tipped to lead his socialist party, Paulo Pedroso, and a former ambassador to South Africa, Jorge Ritto, along with eight others, including a doctor and two television presenters, were all charged with sexually abusing minors.
Outside Portugal most newspapers gave little space to the revelations. They have become all too commonplace.
The allegedly abused children of Portugal represent a fraction of a global industry. Its annual revenues were estimated in 2003 to exceed half a trillion dollars globally. This is twice the value of all United States currency currently in circulation at any given time, more than the annual gross national products of many countries.
To understand the sheer size of profits accruing from such terrible misery, consider this: a million dollars in gold would weigh as much as a Japanese Sumo wrestler. A half trillion dollars would come close to exceeding the entire population weight of a medium sized Australian city.
The profits come from child sexual trafficking in all its forms: white slavery, sex rings, pornography, the sex tourism industry, lap dancing, bogus adoption schemes and procuring the victims -- the untold millions of children globally entrapped in the sex trade industry who are forced to allow their bodies to be used in exchange for food, money, shelter, alcohol and drugs.
Children are bought, sold, traded and misused in underground child sex markets daily. Every state in the United States, and every other nation, contributes in some fashion to the steady flow of children, the customers and exploiters.
It is estimated that the profits from this vast evil empire, when properly invested, would draw an interest exceeding US $2 million an hour. The sexual trafficking in children is not so much an industry but a global empire.
Sovereign and expansionist, it is frequently torn by internal struggle -- fights to the death between the Chinese Triads and the Russian Mafia, between the multi-gangs of the Balkans, are commonplace. But the empire presents a secret front to the world. It is from there it plunders our children, snatches them, never to be seen again.
The predators who control the sexual trafficking in children are well organized. They have thugs who snatch and break the resistance of children; banks who account the empire's profits without asking questions; ships that convey the hapless children from one continent to another and private planes that transport them to clients around the world.
Yet there is little or no cohesive and sustained war against this terrible evil. The United States and Britain try to stamp on the trafficking within its own borders. But as yet there is no universal challenge to the ever-growing sexual trafficking in children.
The shabby streets of Cheb are but one staging post in a necklace of shame that encircles the globe.
To the east of Cheb, a battered Volvo crossed into northern Bosnia. Hidden under filthy blankets were four teenage girls. One, a blonde called Maria, had just celebrated her thirteenth birthday.
To prepare for the long and uncomfortable journey, the girls had each been given an injection by a doctor. They were told it was to alleviate travel sickness. In reality it was a cocktail of drugs to keep them drowsy and unable to try and escape. This is standard procedure for the men operating this segment of the network in sexual trafficking that criss-crosses the Balkans.
The doctor is a man known by his first name only, Goran, in the girl's hometown of Chisinau, the capital of Europe's poorest country, Moldova. It has some of the prettiest children in central Europe. This has made it a magnet for the traffickers.
They moved in soon after the collapse of the Communist system in the country. Since then there is a widely accepted estimate that some 6,000 girls have been trafficked out of Moldova. No one knows how many of them received their drug injections from Dr Goran.
The girls in the Volvo had answered advertisements in a Chisinau newspaper. The ads promised them work in Paris, London and Dublin -- and even in the United States. The posts on offer included maids, nannies, house-keeping and bar work. The ads stressed no previous experience was required. The salaries were far beyond those available in Moldova.
A Moldavian recruiter told the girls their journey would involve them first being secretly driven over the border into Bosnia. There, they would receive passports, for which they had already paid him US $100 -- money borrowed from their families and friends. Then they would go West to earn undreamed of money. So they had been promised.
The break-up of the former Yugoslavia, followed by a vicious war in the region and the establishment of new states under the 1995 Dayton peace accord, had left many Balkan countries with virtually no legislation or border controls to deal with the sexual traffic in young women and children.
By the time Maria and her three young friends had been tricked into making the journey in the Volvo, the profits from sexual trafficking in the Balkans were matching those of the drug trade -- and the penalties for smuggling humans were minimal.
The border guards into Bosnia waved the Volvo through. The car was a familiar sight to them. Each time it crossed, the guards received US $200 for allowing its unhampered passage.
Five hours later the Volvo reached its final destination. "Arizona Market" is on the outskirts of Kosovo. The town resembles the old Wild West rather than Central Europe in the Third Millennium. It is also the UN headquarters in Bosnia.
An area interlaced with muddy tracks lead to establishments with names like Café Marlboro, Café Don, and The Golden Heart. Fronted by heaps of refuse, used condoms and empty liquor bottles, they are brothels. Between them stand wooden huts selling cheap denim clothes, alcohol, perfume, and guns.
Inside the sleazy bars, the scene seldom changes: dimmed red lights, loud music, cheap drinks -- and semi-naked girls. Usually they are draped over the men known as "the internationalists". These are the soldiers of the United Nations multi-national peace keeping force. In 2003, it consisted of 45,000 soldiers drawn from 39 countries. In addition, there were some 7,000 UN staff as well as members of over 200 Western aid agencies.
Many of the girls appear to be drugged -- and not only from the ready supply of cocaine and heroin on open sale.
An American aid agency worker said: "Lookit, the bar owners who bought these girls like to keep them nice and quiet. So they buy drugs from some of the UN medics to do so. When a girl has finished her shift, she is taken to her room by a bar man and given a shot. When she wakes up she is ready for her next shift".
This is Arizona Market. Officially established by the peacekeeping forces to foster trade between Serbs, Croats and Muslims, today its five square miles is the epicenter of Bosnia's booming sex-slaves trade.
This was the destination of the four young girls. They would work here as prostitutes -- and maybe die -- in this forsaken place.
Almost 2,000 miles to the south of Bosnia, in the tropical heat of West Africa, a group of girls, each no more than thirteen years old, made their way to a small square in the suburbs of Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast. They were escorted by hard-faced young men, the gold in their teeth glinting in the searing sunlight.
Dressed in their Sunday best -- colourful print cotton dresses -- with hair washed and combed, the girls were directed to sit on wooden benches in the centre of the square.
Each girl was for sale as a slave. Their prices ranged from US $5 -- the cost of a coffee in what passes for the city's finest hotel -- to the most expensive child, an eleven year old, costing US $15.
The place is known, locally, as Le Marche de Jeunes Filles -- the Market of Young Girls.
Buyers, men carrying fly-whisks, and sharp-eyed women, strolled up and down along the benches, feeling one girl's arm, looking at another's teeth. One was asked to stand and twirl. Another to bend.
Around the edges of the square stood the traders. The moment a prospective buyer stopped, a trader was there to emphasise a girl's good points.
"She is young and disease free. She is strong and will obey your every command. She will do whatever you want..." he would intone.
No one knows today how many sexual slaves there are in the world. The International Organisation for Migration estimated in December, 2003, that from Eastern Europe alone there could be half a million.
Anti-Slavery International believes the global figure may run to "tens of millions". The one certainty, adds the world's oldest human rights organisation, is that there are more sexual slaves than ever before.
The United States State Department announced in June, 2003, that fifteen countries were now deeply involved in trafficking humans. They included Greece and Italy, both members of the European Community. The State Department estimated that through the fifteen countries almost one million adults and children brought and sold annually into the sex slave market. Secretary of State Colin Powell rightly called it a blight on humanity.
There is growing evidence that many of those slaves are traded over the internet; pimps, often catering for extreme sexual demands ranging from unprotected sex to torture, can log on to women and children best suited to their "markets".
In Britain, Scotland Yard believes that over 5,000 girls from former-Communist countries were smuggled into the country in 2003. Each earned their pimps an estimated over US $2,000 a day.
Bill Hughes, Director General of Britain's National Crime Squad, said: "A growing number of girls are barely into their teens. Although the number is small compared to such countries as Greece and Italy, it has had a startling impact on London's indigenous vice trade.
"British teenagers have been moved out by their pimps into the city suburbs as their rates are undercut by sex slaves imported from the Balkans into London's traditional Soho red light district.
"They have come from Romania, the Ukraine and Moldova. The great majority have escaped from dirt-poor villages, with no modern form of communications -- some villages do not even have a single telephone let alone a policeman.
"That makes it easier for a young girl to be lured away or kidnapped from their homes -- and never to be traced again", added Hughes.
The former Soviet Republics are the nexus of the traffic. Serbia and Yugoslavia are key staging posts along this road of unspeakable misery. It is in those countries that the majority of girls are housed, waiting for pimps to conduct an initial inspection. The girls -- and some boys -- are then taken by road to one of the regular "flesh markets".
In 2003, those sales took place in the many apartment block complexes on the outskirts of Belgrade. The girls are handled like livestock and, once one has been bought by a pimp -- prices can be up to US $1,500 for a teenager, double that for a pre-teen -- the victim will usually be beaten, drugged and forced to have sex with scores of men a week. If she tries to escape, she can be subjected to further horrendous sexual abuse -- and warned that if she tries again to escape, her family back home will be killed.
The Belgrade apartments are owned by Semion Yokovich Mogilevich. He is a specialist in every type of major crime. A document by MI5, Britain's internal security service, describes this Ukranian as "one of the most dangerous criminals on earth".
Mogilevich is wanted in the United States for a multitude of crimes including bank frauds, money laundering and other currency offences. He is protected by his own private army -- and, according to CIA sources, he has a liking for young girls. Documents in the agency possession show he is a regular visitor to the apartments to pick out a girl.
One CIA document identifies Mogilevich as the head of the Rising Sun, one of Moscow's major criminal families.
"His business is global prostitution, drug running and traffic in humans. He runs a dark and evil empire. A number of people who have crossed his path have been disposed of. He has his own team of killers never further away than a phone call", said former British intelligence officer Colin Wallace.
Unable to travel to the West for fear of immediate arrest, Mogilevich moves between Moscow and Belgrade with his bodyguards and his latest choice of girl.
The office for the UN High Commission for Human Rights has identified other criminal gangs from Macedonia and Serbia as being involved in sex trafficking. But along with Mogilevich, it is the criminal warlords of Albania who now dominate it.
A report prepared by the Commission states:
"Girls who've shown signs of disobedience have had their feet cemented into washbasins before being dumped in the Aegean Sea. Others have been horrifically tortured. The Albanian gangs have a seemingly endless supply of women, and their power extends way beyond their homeland to the underworlds of Italy and parts of New York. The victims do not officially exist and are powerless to resist."
Most Albanian gangsters are men in their twenties from the backward north of the country. Rather than being based around individual gangland bosses, they are organized in clans bound by an ancient code of honour called kanun. Some of the profits are returned to their homelands.
In 2002, UN administration in Kosovo and Bosnia enacted new laws to prohibit the traffic. But there have been few prosecutions, and such as have occurred have been tainted by charges of corruption. UN teams set up to rescue the girls have often found that when they organise a raid, the brothel-keepers have been tipped off.
A UN report into trafficking claims that some Western officials are undermining attempts to clean up the trade by becoming cronies of Balkan pimps. The same is true of some of the international and local police. In one case, cited by the report, Bulgarian border police took money from girls to secure their safe passage back to Bulgaria, only to hand them back to the traffickers in exchange for yet more money.
The fate of those four young girls who were smuggled over the border into Bosnia to work in Arizona Market was to be hustled from the Volvo into a large wooden building. Standing around its walls were the brothel keepers of Arizona Market. Maria and her companions were ordered to undress. When Maria refused, her dress was ripped from her. Naked, she and the other girls were forced to stand on wooden crates. The brothel keepers physically inspected the women.
Then the bidding began. In minutes Maria had been sold to a brothel keeper for US $1,500. The other girls fetched prices ranging from US $350 to US $1,200.
For US $20 a client could spend thirty minutes with Maria. For US $2.50 he could buy a bottle of beer while he satisfied himself.
Maria would soon discover that there was no escape from a life where she is expected to have unprotected sex. She is owned body and soul by the man who bought her. All she receives are three meals a day, a bed to sleep on and the skimpy clothes her owner insists she must wear to attract clients.
A UN peacekeeper in Kosovo, who asked not to be named, told me: "Often the girls are sold on by other brothel keepers. They are traded like cattle and are routinely beaten and drugged. If a girl tries to escape, she is raped or tortured -- or told that her mother back home will be killed."
Milan Sitilovic, the Bosnian police chief with responsibility for Arizona Market says: "How can we stop it? Prostitution is the oldest profession in the world".
Frederick Larson who headed the office of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Sarajevo identified the problem, "the girls are terrified of testifying against their owners. Those who dare to do so are simply murdered".
In 2001, the naked bodies of several girls were found in a river near Arizona Market. They bore the hallmarks of Russian mafia-style killings; hands had been tied behind their backs and their feet set in concrete. Their breasts had been slashed off.
Arizona Market is situated close to the Bosnian headquarters of the US peacekeeping force. During 2002, six Russian soldiers, members of K-For, gang-raped two girls in the Arizona Market. As they were "owned" by the club owner, the soldiers paid him a small sum in compensation. No other charges were brought against the rapists.
Those who survive such inhumane treatment are often sold on to the international slave market.
Paul Holmes, of London's Metropolitan Police Vice Squad, has estimated that 80% of all women working in the brothels of Britain's capital are from the Balkans. His own investigations concluded that the traffic in women had made their owners at least US $75 million since the start of the Third Millennium.
His facts and figures can be repeated through the Western world. In Paris, Dublin, Rome, New York, Montreal and Los Angeles, police report the same story: when rescued from sexual bondage, the women are too terrified to testify against those who traffic in them.
As of now the penalties against trading in preteen sex slaves is small compared to those handed out against drug runners or arms dealers. Indeed, in Bosnia, the offence is not even on the statute book.
Pino Arlacchi, executive director of the United Nations Office of Drug Control and Crime Prevention said: "the trafficking in people is now the fastest growing transnational criminal activity".
Frederick Larson explained that, apart from his organisation, there is almost nothing to protect sex slaves in Bosnia.
The girls are regarded as illegal immigrants, and are treated as such, rather than the victims of gross human rights violations. All NATO and UN officials who frequent Arizona Market are entitled to immunity from Bosnian prosecution -- although not from legal consequences when they return home.
However, the possibility of any conviction in a US or UK court is non-existent, given that no abused girl is ever likely to be able to give evidence.
Recently an international police team carried out a raid on three bars in Arizona Market. They rescued thirty-four girls, three of whom were aged just fourteen. The raids were carried out without the assistance of the local police.
Afterwards, team members faced disciplinary charges for "exceeding their authority". The charges were not pursued; the officers have quietly left Bosnia.
The IOM has set up safe houses in Sarajevo to protect girls, some as young as eleven, who have escaped from brothels.
"The best we can do is to offer them support and repatriation", said Larson.
But the reality again is that a girl who does go home to a country like Moldova is often cast-out by her family who suspect what happened to her in Bosnia. All too often, she ends up prostituting herself on the streets of the country's capital, Chisnau.
In Bosnia, the international peace-keeping force has failed to control, let alone eradicate, the transport of sexual slaves.
Jaque Grinberg, the UN missions head of civil affairs -- a caring and committed official -- said there was "an urgent need for an effective border force". The office of the High Representative in Bosnia ordered its creation. But there was no money to bring it to reality.
The trafficking business started with the arrival of UN peacekeepers in 1993. Until then Bosnia had no "sex industry". The mission of the peacekeepers was to bring democracy. But too many of their members saw an easy way to make money as well as satisfy their own sexual desires.
"After the peacekeepers arrived, criminal gangs who had smuggled guns during the war began to traffic in women and girls. There was more profit and less risk. And so it goes on", said a member of the international police force, Don Thomas.
"The evils of what is going on are obvious. But the problem is that the victims are horribly exploited, many of them also claim they are not in Bosnia involuntarily. That is the rub. How can you convince some kid who is so terrified that she will not talk? If she opens her mouth she is dead meat", added Thomas.
The worst offenders are the 3,000 Russian peace-keepers. Some girls have described how friends were taken into the Russian camps and never seen again.
Unlike Bosnia, where the UN peacekeepers arrived in a blaze of publicity, no one knows exactly when "the Germans" started to arrive in their big cars for sex with the children of Cheb.
The men who drive into the cheerless town know they no longer have to fly to Thailand to have sex with a child.
Many of the child prostitutes come from Cheb's large Roman refugee population. Their knowledge of German is confined to the sexual words of their trade.
By night, they haunt the park adjoining the town's Evropska Street or stand in darkened doorways in the alleys.
New byelaws have forbidden street prostitution in the centre of Cheb; video cameras have been installed to monitor the area.
Catherin Schauer, a nurse who works for Karo, a child-rescue project supported by the German Red Cross and the European Commission, said the police are largely indifferent to what goes on.
"Those who work as prostitutes are usually homeless and turned on to drugs. They start by sniffing glue and then move on to a substance known as 'Äòpiko", a cheap amphetamine which suppresses feelings of cold and hunger", said Schauer.
Some of the children have been born in Cheb after their families fled from eastern Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. At an age when their childhood is beginning to expand, they are forced into prostitution.
One girl, her face smeared with make-up who admitted she was thirteen, said "the Germans like us to wear as little as possible. I only wear a short skirt and a t-shirt and my sandals".
She added that in "a good night" she had four or five clients. "They pay me anything from US $20 to US $30 dollars. It's good money for a few hours of work. I always make them use a condom. But some of the younger girls allow unprotected sex. Because they are not menstruating, they believe they won't become pregnant".
Catherine Schauer said that a growing number of these under-age girls had developed HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
She and her colleagues distribute condoms to the children. The rescue centre has a drop-in facility where the children can go for treatment.
"We are a little sensitive about all this. There would not be a problem but for the Germans. We know that the sex tourists are 99 percent from Bavaria and Saxony", said Petr Jaks, Cheb's deputy mayor.
He did admit there had been "a problem to get our police motivated, but we hope this will change soon".
A senior police officer reluctantly agreed to talk on the basis of having his identity concealed.
"My colleagues and I have better things to do than check on every kid who hangs around the streets. As far as we are concerned, they are just out for a night of fun. Look at the way they dress: good quality jeans, Adidas shoes. Sure, they may take a little dope. But so do the kids in Munich."
What about all the Germans who drive into the town every night? The officer shrugged. "They spend good money in our bars. If they pick up a girl, so what. It happens everywhere."
Even small children? He smiled indifferently. "How can you tell if a girl is ten, thirteen or fifteen? These Romanian kids grow up quickly. Anyway, why pick on Cheb? Prostitution is all along the border."
That is true. At every crossing, the child whores are there, alongside the traders selling cheap cigarettes and Becherovka, the Czech national drink.
Catherin Schauer and her small team of dedicated social workers note down the license plate numbers of the German cars entering the town, then send them to the nearest German city of Regensburg.
There is a German law, passed in 1993, under which the Federal Republic can prosecute men who have sex with minors abroad. If found guilty, a culprit can be sentenced up to ten years in jail.
But, as in Bosnia, the reality is very different. Josef Heisl, a police officer with the Regensburg force said "when we get the license plates from Cheb, we do question the car drivers. The men just say they were looking for directions. To make a successful prosecution, we have to catch a man in the act of having sex with a minor -- or get a child to file a complaint. That is purely wishful thinking".
Just as in Cheb, the turnover of girls is high at Le Marche de Jeunes Filles -- the baked earth market place in Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast.
The girls come from the country's remote rural areas, lured away from their villages by promise of a better life in the city. Family and friends sew their new clothes and arrange their hair before they leave home. But once they arrive in Abidjan, they find there is no work; instead they are sold-off like cattle in that market place.
Some, the lucky ones, are sent to toil in up-country cocoa plantations. Others are shipped off to Sudan, where slave traders shackle them for the long journey to the Middle East to restock the region's brothels.
Still others end up in a truck stop called Salgaa on the main Kenya-Uganda highway. It is the biggest whorehouse in central Africa. In 2003, it had 24 bars and 500 prostitutes -- an estimated half of them under age.
In a regional economy that is close to collapse elsewhere, Salgaa is booming. It is a cut-price version of Arizona Market. In Salgaa a child can be procured for one US dollar. In Salgaa the life expectancy of a prostitute is put in months rather than years. Their clients are the thousands of truck drivers who travel every week up and down the highway.
The girls work out of seedy bars with names like the Good Times Hotel and New Paradise.
AIDS is a killer by many names here: "mikingo" meaning "slow puncture"; and "kauzi" meaning "slim as a thread", an apt description to describe the body wasting process of the disease.
Sharin Cmemtai, who admitted to being "only fifteen", said that her "worst clients are the Arabs. They can be very violent. I try to charge them more. But it is impossible for me to keep the extra money. He always takes it straight away after sex".
"He" was her pimp, a burly Kenyan who is reputed to have a stable of fifty young girls, a number of them in their pre-teens, working in Salgaa.
His girls live in a small compound. It has one water tap, two showers and three stinking pit latrines. Most weeks a girl is diagnosed as in the final stages of AIDS. Overnight she will be taken from the compound by the pimp. There is a widespread fear she is dumped in the bush to be devoured by the jackals or other wild animals.
Within hours a new girl will arrive as a replacement.
She, too, can expect to be dead within a year. To survive longer in Salgaa is a miracle.
Only none of the girls who work there believe in such divine intervention.
The global traffic in children for commercial sexual exploitation involves torture and their premeditated rape and mutilation. If and when the authorities decide to take action against the child sex trade, it achieves very little.
This terrible human abuse, the prerogative of no one race or colour, continues to occur under all religions, and where there is no religion. The sexual traffic in children is the product of greed and lust which feeds off abject poverty.
There is no solution in sight until that poverty is addressed -- and the traffickers sentenced to long terms. By a collective indifference and silence, the betrayal of children will persist.
Gordon Thomas' work includes the five-times nominated Academy Award winner "Voyage Of The Damned"; "Enola Gay", winner of the Emmy Best Foreign Film prize; "A Bit Of An Experience", winner of the Monte Carlo Film Festival Critics and Jury's prizes. His "Underpass" received the Best Original Screenplay submission at the 1999 Cannes Festival.

[Magda Hassan]

Thank you America. Not. Women in soviet times would never have to be subjected to any such inhumane treatment. Every one had a home and a job with dignity. Such a system was unacceptable to the US and was not permitted to stand.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Thank you America. Not. Women in soviet times would never have to be subjected to any such inhumane treatment. Every one had a home and a job with dignity. Such a system was unacceptable to the US and was not permitted to stand.

Yes.

I came across the Arizona Market in free market thinktanks a few years ago. These thinktanks were lauding the Arizona Market as some sort of Fundamental Proof of the Inevitable Victory of Capitalism. Out of Chaos, Dynamic Markets would arise and create Order.

Well, here's the truth about your fucking Arizona Market and Capitalism as Divine Scripture:

The shabby streets of Cheb are but one staging post in a necklace of shame that encircles the globe.
To the east of Cheb, a battered Volvo crossed into northern Bosnia. Hidden under filthy blankets were four teenage girls. One, a blonde called Maria, had just celebrated her thirteenth birthday.
To prepare for the long and uncomfortable journey, the girls had each been given an injection by a doctor. They were told it was to alleviate travel sickness. In reality it was a cocktail of drugs to keep them drowsy and unable to try and escape. This is standard procedure for the men operating this segment of the network in sexual trafficking that criss-crosses the Balkans.
The doctor is a man known by his first name only, Goran, in the girl's hometown of Chisinau, the capital of Europe's poorest country, Moldova. It has some of the prettiest children in central Europe. This has made it a magnet for the traffickers.
They moved in soon after the collapse of the Communist system in the country. Since then there is a widely accepted estimate that some 6,000 girls have been trafficked out of Moldova. No one knows how many of them received their drug injections from Dr Goran.
The girls in the Volvo had answered advertisements in a Chisinau newspaper. The ads promised them work in Paris, London and Dublin -- and even in the United States. The posts on offer included maids, nannies, house-keeping and bar work. The ads stressed no previous experience was required. The salaries were far beyond those available in Moldova.
A Moldavian recruiter told the girls their journey would involve them first being secretly driven over the border into Bosnia. There, they would receive passports, for which they had already paid him US $100 -- money borrowed from their families and friends. Then they would go West to earn undreamed of money. So they had been promised.
The break-up of the former Yugoslavia, followed by a vicious war in the region and the establishment of new states under the 1995 Dayton peace accord, had left many Balkan countries with virtually no legislation or border controls to deal with the sexual traffic in young women and children.
By the time Maria and her three young friends had been tricked into making the journey in the Volvo, the profits from sexual trafficking in the Balkans were matching those of the drug trade -- and the penalties for smuggling humans were minimal.
The border guards into Bosnia waved the Volvo through. The car was a familiar sight to them. Each time it crossed, the guards received US $200 for allowing its unhampered passage.
Five hours later the Volvo reached its final destination. "Arizona Market" is on the outskirts of Kosovo. The town resembles the old Wild West rather than Central Europe in the Third Millennium. It is also the UN headquarters in Bosnia.
An area interlaced with muddy tracks lead to establishments with names like Café Marlboro, Café Don, and The Golden Heart. Fronted by heaps of refuse, used condoms and empty liquor bottles, they are brothels. Between them stand wooden huts selling cheap denim clothes, alcohol, perfume, and guns.
Inside the sleazy bars, the scene seldom changes: dimmed red lights, loud music, cheap drinks -- and semi-naked girls. Usually they are draped over the men known as "the internationalists". These are the soldiers of the United Nations multi-national peace keeping force. In 2003, it consisted of 45,000 soldiers drawn from 39 countries. In addition, there were some 7,000 UN staff as well as members of over 200 Western aid agencies.
Many of the girls appear to be drugged -- and not only from the ready supply of cocaine and heroin on open sale.
An American aid agency worker said: "Lookit, the bar owners who bought these girls like to keep them nice and quiet. So they buy drugs from some of the UN medics to do so. When a girl has finished her shift, she is taken to her room by a bar man and given a shot. When she wakes up she is ready for her next shift".
This is Arizona Market. Officially established by the peacekeeping forces to foster trade between Serbs, Croats and Muslims, today its five square miles is the epicenter of Bosnia's booming sex-slaves trade.
This was the destination of the four young girls. They would work here as prostitutes -- and maybe die -- in this forsaken place.

A UN report into trafficking claims that some Western officials are undermining attempts to clean up the trade by becoming cronies of Balkan pimps. The same is true of some of the international and local police. In one case, cited by the report, Bulgarian border police took money from girls to secure their safe passage back to Bulgaria, only to hand them back to the traffickers in exchange for yet more money.
The fate of those four young girls who were smuggled over the border into Bosnia to work in Arizona Market was to be hustled from the Volvo into a large wooden building. Standing around its walls were the brothel keepers of Arizona Market. Maria and her companions were ordered to undress. When Maria refused, her dress was ripped from her. Naked, she and the other girls were forced to stand on wooden crates. The brothel keepers physically inspected the women.
Then the bidding began. In minutes Maria had been sold to a brothel keeper for US $1,500. The other girls fetched prices ranging from US $350 to US $1,200.
For US $20 a client could spend thirty minutes with Maria. For US $2.50 he could buy a bottle of beer while he satisfied himself.
Maria would soon discover that there was no escape from a life where she is expected to have unprotected sex. She is owned body and soul by the man who bought her. All she receives are three meals a day, a bed to sleep on and the skimpy clothes her owner insists she must wear to attract clients.
A UN peacekeeper in Kosovo, who asked not to be named, told me: "Often the girls are sold on by other brothel keepers. They are traded like cattle and are routinely beaten and drugged. If a girl tries to escape, she is raped or tortured -- or told that her mother back home will be killed."
Milan Sitilovic, the Bosnian police chief with responsibility for Arizona Market says: "How can we stop it? Prostitution is the oldest profession in the world".
Frederick Larson who headed the office of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Sarajevo identified the problem, "the girls are terrified of testifying against their owners. Those who dare to do so are simply murdered".
In 2001, the naked bodies of several girls were found in a river near Arizona Market. They bore the hallmarks of Russian mafia-style killings; hands had been tied behind their backs and their feet set in concrete. Their breasts had been slashed off.
Arizona Market is situated close to the Bosnian headquarters of the US peacekeeping force. During 2002, six Russian soldiers, members of K-For, gang-raped two girls in the Arizona Market. As they were "owned" by the club owner, the soldiers paid him a small sum in compensation. No other charges were brought against the rapists.
Those who survive such inhumane treatment are often sold on to the international slave market.
Paul Holmes, of London's Metropolitan Police Vice Squad, has estimated that 80% of all women working in the brothels of Britain's capital are from the Balkans. His own investigations concluded that the traffic in women had made their owners at least US $75 million since the start of the Third Millennium.
His facts and figures can be repeated through the Western world. In Paris, Dublin, Rome, New York, Montreal and Los Angeles, police report the same story: when rescued from sexual bondage, the women are too terrified to testify against those who traffic in them.

Before the free market thinktanks started mythologising about the Arizona Market, Thomas Pynchon described it in the context of WW2, in his masterwork Gravity's Rainbow:

"What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as a spectacle, as a diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled "black" by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks, continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars."

[Anthony Thorne]

I've made a pertinent update to the Core of Corruption thread that (briefly) summarizes the suggested links I noted some pages back between Sullivan and 9/11. There is much more to the story - many pages of links and an entirely separate, ongoing Colorado scandal regarding criminal links to elite prostitution agencies in the State (there are many mainstream news stories on this and I'll post a few links later for others to ponder - Elinoff and one of his radio hosts felt the mainstream prostitution story and the Franklin details covered the same locales, featured many repeat figures, and suggested a darker, organised crime ring at work that used Sullivan for who and what he could get) but I've now noted the key allegations.[URL="https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?10559-Core-of-Corruption-series-cancelled/page2"]

https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sho...lled/page2[/URL]

The 'Brassman' I queried about a few posts back was/is reportedly Sullivan, who Elinoff cited as being a key player in Franklin Scandal activities since the 90's. Sullivan leads to Franklin, which leads to Offutt. Mike Vreeland trod some of the same dark paths as Franklin. Vreeland may have heard things he shouldn't, and used that information for his own purposes. When Elinoff, by chance, ended up chasing leads on both Vreeland and Sullivan, he completed the circle, and that was when the death threats started.

[Jan Klimkowski]

The Paedophile Information Exchange.

Plenty of material in this thread from posts #169 onwards.

The inevitable context for the inconvenient, airbrushed, Express story.

PIE's diplomat was a British spy, his identity protected by Thatcher.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Information about the police investigation into the Elm House paedophile scandal is just beginning to break.

We shall see if it results in the conviction of monsters - celebrities more famous than Savile, politicians more powerful than Hayman and Cyril Smith.

Not forgetting royal bastard and triple agent Anthony Blunt....

Elm guest house scandal: First victim of paedo guest house breaks his silence

2 Feb 2013 21:00


By Keir Mudie, Nick Dorman

Sunday People

They forced us to wear fairy costumes, got us drunk on cider, then the abuse started, victim tells Sunday People
Albanpix

A victim of the VIP paedophile guest house has told the Sunday People of the horrors that went on there.

The former care home orphan says he and his 12-year-old brother were sent by staff to the Elm Guest House for "a treat".

There they were lured into cider and beer-drinking races to get them drunk and ordered to dress in girls' fairy costumes while their pictures were taken.

Finally they were forced to take part in vile sex acts after phoney games of hide-and-seek.

The victim, now a family man, broke down in tears as he told the Sunday People of his nightmare at the Elm and how his tormented brother killed himself a decade after leaving care.

He said: "The people responsible have blood on their hands. I shouldn't think my brother is the only one to have taken his life because of this.

"I'm speaking out now because I want justice done for me and for my brother.

"What went on was absolutely disgusting. When we told the staff at the care home what was happening at Elm they used to say They are friends, they are good people'.

"No one was listening to us. It's taken 30 years for anyone to listen."

The former guest house in upmarket Barnes, south-west London, is now the centre of a major police probe into an alleged child sex abuse ring in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

It is said to have involved senior politicians, showbiz celebrities and members of the royal household.

The first victim to speak publicly has waived his legal right to anonymity but the Sunday People has chosen to identify him only as Dave.

Speaking at his smartly-decorated home, surrounded by photos of his own young children, Dave told how he and his one-year-younger brother were taken into care after their widowed mother killed herself following years of depression.

Flats that used to be Elm guest house Flats that used to be Elm guest house


They were sent to Grafton Close children's home in Hanworth, south-west London, in 1978.

Dave was 13 when minibus outings to the Elm eight miles away began.

He said: "We were told we were going to the good house' for a party.

"It wouldn't be more than a handful of us at a time.

"When we got there it was a huge house. It was so big I felt like I was a kid in a doll's house."

The children were escorted through reception without signing the guest book and taken to a back room where a warped party was soon in full swing.

Dave said: "There would be easy-listening type music playing, sort of mellow stuff, and loads to drink.

"Sometimes there would be as few as two adults there, other times more.

"They laid on tables with Party Seven beer a big tin with seven pints in it and cider.

"We were given plastic cups and would have sort of races to see who could drink it first.

"They used to make us dress up, make us put on outfits like fairy costumes meant for girls, then play games of hide-and-seek with the adults looking for the kids."

When the children were "found", they were forced to take part in appalling sex abuse.

Dave said: "There would be flash bulbs going off when someone was going round taking pictures. All this took place during the day, whatever day of the week they fancied.

"I can remember all the adults had posh accents. They used to say things like He's cute, he's nice'.

"They would pick out the pretty boys, especially the ones who looked young for their age."

Dave's testimony echoes that of former child protection worker Chris Fay, who says he was shown photos of children dressed up at so-called "Kings and Queens" parties at the Elm.

One photograph is said to show a former Tory Cabinet minister in a sauna with a naked 14-year-old boy.

Dave claims one man he met at the guest house arranged for him to visit his flat where he was groomed into performing sex acts, then handed a couple of pounds "pocket money" to keep him coming back.

Dave said: "I can still see the guy's face now. He was posh and I have since seen him on television.

"He was very fat. He said he didn't live far away and told me If you're passing by that way come and see me'.

"He would give me money. We got no - pocket money at the home and I wanted some.

"That makes it sound like I made a choice but it was abuse."

Elm Guest House advertisement Elm Guest House advertisement


Dave added: "I had lost my mum and dad, and when I went to school I'd had the mickey taken out of me.

"So at the time, to start with, it was like finally someone is taking notice of us'. But we were vulnerable, they were meant to be looking after us."

Dave said he thought "this is what you have to do to get on in life, if I don't do this I'm going to end up a misfit".

Dave's brother Peter took a fatal drug overdose in 1994 six days after his 28th birthday after years of torment stemming from the abuse he too suffered.

It is believed he himself had become an abuser.

He left a note saying he feared he would be unable to control his violent fantasies against women if he remained alive.

Peter had treatment at Broadmoor secure hospital and his case worker said his mental problems were partly a result of the abuse he had suffered while in local authority care.

One line in his suicide note seemed to refer to this. It read: "I will get those bastards."

Dave claimed Peter got a pay-off from Richmond council which oversaw the Grafton home after he complained about his treatment there.

He believes it is evidence of an official attempt to cover up the abuse.

Dave fled less than two years after being sent to the Grafton.

He said: "In the end it just got too much for me. No one ever came to find me. I was sleeping rough and I ended up in prison."

Last week Dave was visited by two officers from the Met Police's Operation Fernbridge.

The unit is investigating claims of a VIP paedophile ring at the Elm, first raised in the Commons by MP Tom Watson. Arrests are expected within weeks.

Dave, one of around a dozen victims who have been interviewed, spent more than half an hour discussing his time in care and later spoke to the officers about the Elm by telephone.

Dave, who lives in a seaside town over 100 miles from the guest house, went on: "When I saw a picture of the place on the internet I nearly jumped out of my chair.

"It was the same house I had been taken all those years ago. It's brought it all back. It's turned my world upside down.

"I'm a family man now, I've got kids of my own, and I never thought all this would come out again. I've not been able to sleep since the police turned up at my house.

"People are telling me to stay strong but it's not that easy."

In a final insult Dave says he wrote to Richmond council asking for paperwork about him and his brother but was told he would have to pay £10 to be sent any information.

He said: "I just couldn't believe it. Even now this is their attitude. It says it all."

Cyril Smith MP Cyril Smith MP
Mirrorpix


Two VIPs named as regular users of the Elm are MI5 traitor Anthony Blunt who died in 1983 and Cyril Smith, the former Liberal MP for Rochdale who died in 2010.

On Friday, after studying a picture of Smith, Dave said the overweight politician was not the "fat man" who had abused him.

Yesterday Richmond council refused to comment on claims it had paid settlements to abuse victims. It also would not comment on Dave and his brother.

But a spokesman said: "We take any allegations of abuse very seriously. We are offering our full support and cooperation to the police.

"As the investigation is ongoing, it would be inappropriate to comment further at this time."

The owners of the Elm at the time of the alleged VIP cover-up, Haroon and Carole Kasir, were convicted in 1982 of running a gay brothel.

[Jan Klimkowski]

More Elm House horror - the European paedophile network known as "Spartacus", with strong Paedophile Information Exchange links.

By David Hencke, David Pallister
Sunday People

Elm guest house scandal: Coded advert that gave signal to perverts

2 Feb 2013 21:00

A written message is understood to have alerted abusers that young boys were available for sex, Exaro website reveals
Flats that used to be Elm guest house Flats that used to be Elm guest house

Adverts for Elm guest house included a coded invitation to paedophiles, the Exaro investigative website has revealed.

The written message "10% Discount to Spartacus Club Members" is understood to have alerted abusers that young boys were available for sex.

According to Exaro, files seized by police last month also name a man who helped turn Elm guest house into a paedophile brothel allegedly used by MPs and other VIPs.

The key figure who persuaded co-manager Carole Kasir to create a haven for homosexual men to have sex with boys is identified in the papers as Peter G, who was part of an underground paedophile network called Spartacus'.

The evidence raises serious questions for the senior politicians and other VIPs who, according to the files, visited the guest house in Barnes, south-west London.

In a joint investigation last weekend, Exaro and the Sunday People disclosed how a Conservative party campaign group "strongly recommended" the guest house to members in a newsletter.

Papers relating to the guest house including a list of alleged VIP visitors were seized in a police raid last month.

The papers also suggest that two men *persuaded Carole Kasir to change it into a place for homosexual men in 1982.

According to the files, they then introduced her to Peter G, one of whose roles was to create a network of venues for Spartacus members.

Subsequently adverts appeared in the gay press, including Capital Gay magazine, promoting Elm for its sauna and video room and featuring the coded "discount" to Spartacus members message.

Spartacus International, a gay guide, identified Peter G as its commercial manager. It was the mechanism through which the Spartacus Club attracted members.

A German company has since taken over Spartacus International and transformed it into a respectable publisher of gay guides.

But in the early 1980s Spartacus Club and Spartacus International were run from Amsterdam by John Stamford, a former Roman Catholic priest from Lancashire, who moved to Holland after being convicted in England of sending pornographic material through the post. It was reported to have 25,000 British members.

The group was named after the leader of the Roman slave revolt, who has long been a gay icon, especially after the scene in Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film in which the character of Crassus, a senator, is helped to bathe by his young slave, Antoninus.

Stamford masqueraded as a libertarian gay, but championed the Paedophile Information Exchange, a network that promoted sex with children.

Between 1979 and 1985, Stamford also published PAN, or Paedo Alert News, which described itself as a "magazine about boy-love."

Spartacus was exposed by The Sunday Times in 1986. Undercover reporters were offered two boys in Manila, aged 8 and 14. Stamford was quoted as saying: "If you are discreet, I can guarantee you will get as many boys as you want in the Philippines.

"Our chaps there will fix it up, and all it will cost you is a meal for the guides, and just the equivalent of a pound or so for the kid per night."

Stamford died in prison of a heart attack aged 56 in Belgium in 1995 just before he was due to stand trial on child sex charges.

Carole Kasir who died at the age of 47 in 1990 from an overdose in an apparent suicide.

Her husband and co-manager of Elm Guest House, Haroon, or "Harry", Kasir, works for a disabled charity in south west London.

His home has been raided by officers from Operation Fernbridge. Kasir was not arrested but it is likely that he will be interviewed again by police. He has refused to comment to Exaro and the Sunday People .