Child sex boss escapes trial (14.11.84)

Daily Mirror, 14th November 1984

Belgian police link child sex victims to trade with East

 

Times, The (London, England)-August 21, 1996
Author: Roger Boyes in Charleroi

Businessman is fourth to be charged as fears increase of international ring.

BELGIAN police are investigating the possibility of a major East-West link in the European child sex business after charging a fourth suspected member of a paedophile ring.

Jean-Michel Nihoul, a Brussels businessman, was hustled into a court yesterday to be charged with criminal association with Marc Dutroux, who has already led police to the bodies of two eight-year-old girls and another suspected accomplice.

Suspects are being moved around various courts in the area to keep them safe from hostile crowds.

The defence team for Nihoul, who denies any connection with a paedophilia racket, says he merely lent his car to Dutroux.

Dutroux’s second wife, Michelle Martin, has been charged with being an accomplice in the unlawful abduction and illegal imprisonment of children.

Many clues suggest that the Belgian paedophilia scandal is part of an international network. A 59-year-old Dutch businessman living in Belgium has been held for questioning, bolstering press speculation that Dutch pornography groups have been spilling over the border.

But the most intriguing lead comes from the confession by Dutroux – a convicted child rapist – that he abducted two teenage girls in Ostend last year.

The girls, 19-year-old Eefje Lambrecks and 17-year-old An Marchal, were seen talking to a Czech girl in the port shortly before they were snatched. One theory, partly supported by Dutroux’s confession, is that the girls were sold into a pornography and prostitution ring operating from Prague. Czech police say there is no evidence to support that.

The abduction of Western girls eastwards would run counter to the trend of the past five years, which has seen hundreds of Central and East European girls being sold to Western brothels and nightclubs. But the paedophilia business is more complex than prostitution rackets: adult women, who can work hard as prostitutes, are sometimes traded for abducted children.

Leads are being followed up in Germany, The Netherlands and France. Britain has been asked for technical help, in particular with the search techniques used to detect buried bodies in the murder inquiry involving Fred and Rosemary West, as well as for advice on the structure of paedophile gangs.

The Belgian police, for the first time, have also pooled their information on 15 children who have disappeared over the past six years. Seven of those are known to have been killed.

There seems to be no indication that Britain is involved in this apparent paedophile web, although Belgian police have been alert to a possible British connection since the arrest last year of John Stamford. He was head of the Spartacus International Paedophile Group and died during his trial before a Belgian court last December.

Belgian contacts with the German Bureau of Criminal Investigation confirm the possible involvement of Russian groups.

The search for an international connection partly reflects a Belgian reluctance to accept that such crimes can be committed by Belgians on their own children. But it is also in the nature of organised paedophilia to move across frontiers and exploit differences in the law.

“They are very efficient in the sense that they make the best use of new technical possibilities such as the Internet,” Raymond Kendall, Secretary-General of Interpol, said yesterday. “In many cases, national legislation did not foresee the effects of the Internet and lags behind.”

Dutroux, who is charged with kidnapping and illegal imprisonment of children, owns 11 houses. Yet he was an unemployed electrician with no legal source of income, apart from the dole.

 

John Stamford `ran child sex ring for clients worldwide’

Times, The (London, England)-November 24, 1994
Author: Wolfgang Munchau in Brussels

A BRITON accused of being at the centre of a paedophile ring that procured child prostitutes for clients all over the world went on trial in a Belgian court yesterday.

John Stamford, 55, was charged after police raided his premises last year in the small Belgian town of Geel near the Dutch border, and, it is alleged, found a cache of paedophile magazines. Publication and distribution of such material is illegal under Belgian law, but carries a maximum prison term of one year.

However, in addition to the relatively minor criminal charge, Mr Stamford faces a parallel civil action in the same court brought by four human rights organisations, alleging that the magazine acted as the front for Club Spartacus, an international paedophile ring with an estimated 30,000 members. The court at Turnhout, near Belgium’s border with The Netherlands, was told that Mr Stamford operated under the public front of Spartacus, a gay travel magazine that has been published since 1970 and has a circulation of 60, 000.

If the civil rights organisations, led by the Swiss-based group Terres des Hommes, succeed with their action, Mr Stamford could face a prison term of between ten and 20 years after another criminal trial.

The groups allege that Club Spartacus was a sophisticated and clandestine organisation that operated through a box number in London. The details of each of the members, including their sexual preferences, the desired age of the children and preferred countries of origin were stored on a computer, each entry guarded with a secret code.

The members received personalised “lists” of children, mainly outside Europe. The client would then select a child and indicate his choice to a local middleman. In one of the documents obtained by Terres des Hommes, Mr Stamford offers “boys of every age, shape and type”, adding that “between January and May 1978 I personally tested lots of these boys”.

Another extract was even more explicit. “Children are available from the age of puberty, or even before. Despite legislation on the protection of minors, nobody has any objections. The majority of the hotels charge you more if you want a European for the night, but not in the case of a Filipino.

“You enter the hall with your boy, you take your key, and you go directly into your room.” However, the evidence collected by the human rights groups has not yet convinced prosecutors to bring more serious criminal charges at this stage. As a consequence, they have used a Belgian legal procedure which allows them to take action under civil law. The case could set a legal precedent as Belgium does not yet permit prosecution of crimes committed outside the country’s borders.

Germany changed its laws last year to allow prosecution of Germans who travel to Southeast Asia for child-sex tourism. Mr Stamford, who had previously lived in Germany, moved to Belgium after the change in the German law.

In Britain the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 increased penalties and police powers to tackle child pornography and paedophilia. The Act gives police power to arrest without warrant a person suspected of child pornography. It also increases the penalties for possessing indecent photographs of children, making it an imprisonable offence (up to six months’ jail and fines of up to Pounds 5,000). Sentences handed down by the courts in Britain for paeodophilia-linked offences can be equal to life terms.