We can ALMOST declare victory for the good guys! Now, the crowd counterparts to those in America that were all up-in-arms over their pedophile buddies being busted on "To Catch A Predator" will be swinging into action and attempt to make excuses and justifications for Neil.
Justice will havce been served when he's dead or in prison for a very, very long time.
At least, we can feel confident this monster has been caught, and he's not raping any more little boys. (And, maybe, we can start hoping that he's seeing a little action of the rape kind directed at himself in a Thai prison.)
From the NYT, the good word of a child-rapist apprehended.
[quote]
Thai Police Arrest Pedophile SuspectBy SETH MYDANS AND IAN AUSTEN
BANGKOK, Oct. 19 — At first, on the Internet, he was just a swirly face, something akin to a large multicolored lollipop that a man might give to a little boy.
Today, a blue shirt draped over his head, he was arrested and charged as a pedophile by the Thai police after computer experts unswirled the digitally altered face in a virtuoso act of electronic decoding.
The suspect, Christopher Paul Neil, 32, was caught after Interpol issued an unusual international appeal based on some 200 Internet pictures that showed the faceless man sexually abusing boys in Vietnam and Cambodia. Interpol said the man had abused a dozen boys in those countries, some as young as 6.
The Thai police said they had employed some high-tech unscrambling of their own, tracing Mr. Neil to a location outside Bangkok through the cellphone calls of a friend who was in contact with him.
Officials said Mr. Neil, who had been living in Asia for five years and teaching English in Thailand, Vietnam and South Korea, would be prosecuted here and then extradited to his home nation, Canada. The Canadian police force is weighing whether to charge Mr. Neil under a recent law that allows prosecution for sex crimes committed abroad.
But the Canadian authorities are also investigating his years as a teacher and counselor in Canada. Mr. Neil was born in British Columbia, and studied to be a priest there. As part of his training, he volunteered as teacher at a Roman Catholic elementary school in 2000 and 2001. He was eventually asked to leave his studies at Christ the King Seminary in Mission, British Columbia. “He just did not have the qualifications as a person,” Nicholas Ruh, the school’s rector told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation without elaborating.
He served as a volunteer chaplain and counselor at three air cadet summer training camps in Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia between 1997 and 2000. The Canadian Armed Forces said that it has not received any complaints from parents or former cadets about Mr. Neil.
His was the latest in a series of highly publicized arrests of foreigners accused of abusing children in Southeast Asia. They include the British rock star Gary Glitter, who was imprisoned in Vietnam last year, and John Mark Karr, who was arrested here last year and falsely claimed to have killed the American child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey.
Some experts noted that children can be especially vulnerable to authority figures like teachers.
“We are seeing that quite a few of the foreigners who come here are taking jobs as teachers, putting themselves into situations where they are close to children in positions of trust,” said Richard Bridle, the Unicef deputy regional director for East Asia and the Pacific.
But others pointed out that most of those charged with abusing children have not been teachers and noted that foreigners make up a tiny percentage of abusers in Asia.
“Many of us who work in the trafficking field in Southeast Asia are concerned that the spotlight is too much on foreign tourists,” said Allan Dow, Communications Officer for the International Labor Organization’s Mekong Project to Combat Trafficking in Children and Women. “The vast majority — 90 percent — are abused at the hands of locals.”
The Thai arrest warrant was based on the testimony of a boy who said he was lured to Mr. Neil’s apartment by a Thai man. The police said the boy was one of three who came forward with information about Mr. Neil after the appeal showing the suspect’s decoded portraits was televised. They were aged 9, 13 and 14 when they were abused, the authorities said.
The Thai authorities said that Mr. Neil fled here from South Korea a week ago after Interpol distributed the portraits, which it said had been unraveled by German police experts.
Those pictures were published in newspapers here alongside a somewhat similar photograph of a bald man with glasses taken at immigration control in Bangkok, where all arriving passengers are photographed.
Newspapers also printed what officials said were chatty Internet postings by Mr. Neil on the social networking site MySpace.
“Been kicking around Asia for the past five years, teaching mainly and finding other forms of mischief,” reads a personal profile that describes the writer as “5 feet, 11 inches tall, slim and slender.”
“I love teaching, can’t get enough of it really,” the posting says.
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