Freddy Peats died
Sandesh Prabhudesai
4 April 2005
Freddy Peats, the notorious paedophile imprisoned here since
1996, died at the age of 81.
Peats was sentenced to life imprisonment at the central
jail of Aguada. He died at the Goa Medical College hospital,
suffering a paralytic attack.
Peats was serving sentence following his conviction in paedophile
cases.
He was arrested on 3 April 1991 and was chargesheeted in
1992. He was convicted on March 21 1996 and was sentenced
to a life imprisonment.
Later, his accomplice Eoghan Colm McBride was also sentenced
to seven-year rigorous imprisonment in July 2002, along with
Peats, for running child prostitution racket in the southern
coastal belt here.
The Margao police, in 1991, had busted his decade-long paedophilic
racket he was running in the name of Gurukul, an orphanage.
Subsequently, the CBI also handled the case, chargesheeting
altogether six foreigners, including Peats.
However, only 63-year old McBride from New Zealand and Dominique
Sabir from France could be arrested. Due to police negligence,
Sabir, arrested in 1996, managed to jump bail in July 2002.
He is still absconding.
Other four - Werner Wulf Ingo (Australia), Neels Oscar Johnson
(Sweden), Raymond Varley (Bangkok), Zell Jurgen Adreas alias
Yogi (German) are also absconding.
Both Peats and McBride were sentenced for committing offences
of criminal conspiracy, kidnapping, abducting and selling
minors for prostitution.
In fact the whole country was shocked when Peats' decade-long
racket got exposed in 1991. He was running an orphanage called
'Gurukul' in a village near Colva beach in South Goa, but
was actually exploiting the destitute children sexually and
also selling them to other visiting foreigner paedophiles.
The prosecution, while producing several witnesses including
the victims, established a fact that the children were kidnapped,
subjected to sexual abuse and causing injury to them, sold
and made these children available to foreign nationals to
satisfy their sexual lust.
The case was handed over to the CBI as per the high court
orders, after Mumbai-based child rights activist Sheela Barse
approached the court, complaining that the local police authorities
are not seriously investigating into it.
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