As the Euro teeters yet again on the edge of complete collapse and Greece faces up to the possibility of economic Armageddon, the British press have been even more exercised about another issue in the Eastern Mediterranean: a Romanian paedophile ring operating in a Greek Cypriot hotel.
The suspected paedophile gang has apparently been preying on children staying at the Anastasia Beach Complex Hotel in Protaras.
Hard facts are difficult to disentangle amongst a vast amount of often contradictory reports, rumour and speculation. It probably doesn’t help that some of the guests at the hotel were enjoying a wedding party at 8.30 p.m. last Tuesday.
The Scottish Daily Record, quoted Greg Letford, a holidaymaker from Dundee:
“A Romanian couple were leading the two young children towards a waiting car, another person had a third child up against a wall ready to go, too.
“Someone spotted what they were up to and stopped them. If he hadn’t been there those kids would have gone.
“One of the men got away and we heard the getaway car crashed a short distance away too.
“When the police turned up, they took the man and woman into an office in the hotel and a crowd built up in the foyer – there must have been about 60 or 70 really angry people. It was chaos.
“The police got them into a van through a window for their protection. One of the hotel staff later told us they were Romanian and that one of them used to work at the hotel.”
Mr Letford’s account is supported to an extent by Sean McFarlane, a West Belfast man who said an attempt was made to snatch his son, who was playing with another child:
“a gang of suspected eastern-Europeans pulled the children off a wall where they were playing …. The group were talking to the children and tried to coax them into a nearby car which they had “ready to go” but other holidaymakers stepped in.”
He gave a more vivid account to the Daily Mirror:
“I turned my head for two seconds to get a coke and when I looked back the wee boys were at the side of a wall. There was a couple beside us and the young girl said she saw a fella walk in off the street.
“Her partner started shouting, ‘What are you doing with those kids, are you with those kids? The guy was shouting, ‘No, no, no.’
“My kid and the other lad took advantage of the opportunity and got up and ran. Thomas was shouting, ‘Daddy, daddy, that man pulled us on to the ground.’
“Another tourist had the guy. He told me, ‘that b****** had your son.’ I asked him why he touched my son. A crowd then grabbed him and pulled him into the lobby.”
The Daily Mail quoted a 30 year old former soldier and wind turbine engineer, James Down, who noticed a man by the hotel pool. Apparently the same man had earlier been “talking to children” on the beach. There were other suspicious signs:
“I was ex-army myself, massive combat indicators like abnormal stuff – he was wearing sunglasses, he didn’t have a wristband…”
The suspicious man asked Mr Down for a cigarette.
It’s not clear from the Mail’s report whether he gave him one. It seems quite possible that he did, because the man then slipped around a corner where Mr Down found him, cigarette in mouth, “talking to a child.” By this stage two other holidaymakers, one called Bill and the Ulsterman, Mr McFarlane, had turned up.
Seeing a man with a cigarette in his mouth talking to a child, Mr Down did what any Dad would do:
“I got him by the scruff of the neck and took him to the hotel reception and asked him what he was doing.”
Naturally Mr Down (who has been described as a “hero dad” by the Daily Mirror) also “confiscated” the wretched man’s mobile phone and
“it was evident that he had been photographing and videoing children around the entertainment stage. It was mainly just children.”
In fact, when the phone was later looked at by the police they found nothing suspicious.
A Sheffield couple, said to be friends with “the man who chased and punched the Bulgarian” reported the story rather differently to the Cyprus Mail:
“My friend said this ‘gypsy’ had put his arms around his 7-year-old son in the pool earlier that afternoon,” the couple said.
“His wife shouted the man out, but later she saw him back in the foyer. [My friend] ran in and punched him a few times, hard, shouting ‘You had your arms around my kid in the pool’. He wasn’t shouting anything about kidnap gangs.
But then, the couple recalled, “loads of people rushed into the foyer, saying ‘that’s the paedo’.”
There were also “rumours” that the man had been “asking children up to his room.” Mr Down says he was “livid.” Strangely, however, his account does not mention children being led away to waiting vans, and nor does he seem to suggest that the man – the only man – apprehended was doing anything other than talking to a child.
Needless to say, there was a commotion of in the hotel foyer. A woman turned up to speak to the “suspect” but left when she saw the commotion. Whether or not she was part of a paedophile ring, one can see her point. A crowd of British tourists on a paedophile hunt, some of them perhaps lubricated by alcohol, is likely to be a pretty alarming sight. However, Mr Down ran after her and grabbed hold of her too. Apparently other vehicles in the street drove off. Mr Down believes they were “traffickers.” Some cars are said to have crashed in their eagerness to escape, although the police later said they had had no reports of any accidents. Guests are said to believe a gang of up to ten people had been “scoping” the hotel for at least the last week, disguised as waiters.
The police turned up to deal with the disturbance. It sounds as though there was an ugly scene. At one point, an officer is even said to have drawn his gun. According to a Cyprus Police spokesman the families “practically lynched the man.”
The two suspected traffickers were eventually put into a police van and driven away.
It is unclear what, if anything, happened to the woman. She does not seem to have been arrested. The man, who was arrested, turned out to be a 19 year old Bulgarian. His parents are said to be employees of the company running the hotel. According to the police:
“We questioned the suspect, went through his phone and also searched his home. Nothing we found suggests that he is part of a child-abducting gang or that he was stalking children. The footage on his phone showed tourists partying and no children.”
Commenters on the Daily Mail website have been quick to draw the appropriate conclusions. Readers, or at least those who are not distracted by the side panels showing “bra-less Lindsay Lohan “confidently flashing a side-boob” or Shanina Shaik “going topless as she flaunts her pert posterior” will be able to read the most popular comments:
Frightening….Any families going on holiday should be on their guard. Wherever they plan on going! No country is safe!
This is all down to free movement within the European union. Criminals can go anywhere unchecked. Time to get out of the EU.
This is the sex slave black market… where kids don’t get killed, but rather disappear and never show up again — only to wind up in places like Libya or some place in eastern Europe. Parents, WATCH YOUR KIDS.
It would be easy to think that a slight note of hysteria was creeping into the coverage, so it is fortunate that Britain’s best loved ex-detective Mark Williams Thomas has got on the case.
He took to Twitter:
@mwilliamsthomas: Very clear reports of attempted child abductions at a Cyprus hotel are denied by police & tour operator
@chris4msf: @mwilliamsthomas It makes me not trust the police, as for the tour operator – pah! Can you follow this up?
@mwilliamsthomas: @chris4msf am looking into it.
His first step was to appear on ITV on Friday morning, sitting alongside Mr Down, and making the suggestion that “someone who’s got some authority, who knows what they are talking about” should fly out to Cyprus to get to the bottom of what had happened. Who such a person might be we can only guess at. He – or, of course, she – might be an ex-detective with experience of investigating sexual offences against children; if he – or, of course, she – had media experience that would obviously be a considerable advantage, bearing in mind the press interest.
But even as Mr Williams-Thomas was pledging to take up the case, new revelations were coming out about the Anastasia Beach Complex, and an incident which until now had never been reported in the Press.
The Daily Mirror reported that last August a girl called Lillie, the two year old daughter of PE teacher Daniel Mann and his unnamed partner had narrowly avoided being kidnapped. Lillie went missing for 40 minutes. It must have been hideous for her distraught parents, but they eventually found her “in the arms of an Eastern European woman … walking towards a car park.” The woman said that she had found their daughter and was taking her to the hotel. By the time they had finished “checking over Lillie” (there is no suggestion that she had been harmed) the woman had disappeared. They asked the hotel management to call the police, but the manager fobbed them off, saying:
“You’ve got her back. That’s it”
For some reason the parents did not report the “kidnapping” until they got home when they complained to the Durham police. We don’t know what the Durham Police made of it, or indeed what they could reasonably be expected to do with no obvious crime and a stone cold trail in another jurisdiction. Possibly their view was that the Eastern European woman was more likely to have been a good Samaritan who had rescued a lost child than a paedophile monster engaged in an unsuccessful kidnap. Unlike commenters to the Daily Mail website it is unlikely that they counted the mere fact that she was “Eastern European” as evidence that she was a dangerous criminal.
Of course it would be unwise to rush to judgement about either this, or the latest incident before Mr Williams-Thomas, or some other equally wise and authoritative person, has had time to report. It is possible that he will uncover a Romanian paedophile ring. It would be naive to rely simply on the self-serving denials of the Cyprus police force and the hotel management, when Mr Williams-Thomas has hardly had time to begin his investigation.
Of course it is possible that if Mr Williams-Thomas, or another equally wise and authoritative person, ever gets to the bottom of what happened, it will turn out that what took place was not an attempted kidnapping but an assault on an innocent Bulgarian. We must wait and see.
At the moment I would say it is too early to cancel any bookings at the Anastasia Beach Complex, although if you happen to be of Romanian or other Eastern European appearance you may be concerned about a small risk that you will be lynched if you talk to a child, and a rather higher risk that you will be attacked if you touch one.
Despite the alleged presence of a large gang of paedophiles in the hotel, some disguised as waiters, no child has in fact been stolen or (as far as we know) abused in any way. This seems a point of some significance which has been largely overlooked.
One would have thought that if the paedo gang had been operating for some time, and particularly if it was already in place in August last year, it would have struck “successfully” by now. If it exists it must be competent enough to evade detection by the hotel management and police, yet too incompetent to succeed in its primary objective of stealing children. After all that preparation the attempted kidnap, if that it was it was, has been utterly botched.
The only suspected paedophile apprehended was grabbed – according to Mr Down who caught him – by the scruff of the neck for speaking to a child while smoking a cigarette, which he may have just cadged off Mr Down. That seems a slim basis on which to conclude that he was part of a paedophile ring, even if he was also wearing sunglasses. Apart from anything else, it seems very unlikely that a kidnapper about to snatch a child would immediately beforehand ask for a cigarette off somebody who would then be bound to be a possible identification witness.
Moreover, dressing up as waiters and hanging around the hotel for weeks or months before trying to steal a child does seem a bizarre way to organise a paedophile kidnapping ring. It would be hard to conceive of a better way to attract attention, not necessarily from the tourists but certainly from the real waiters who would surely find the presence of ten Romanian waiter-impersonators quite extraordinary and inexplicable. We don’t know whether the hotel is equipped with CCTV: but we do know, as any paedophile ring organiser would also know, that holiday-makers are constantly snapping away with their cameras and i-phones. A lurking child snatcher would know he or she was at particularly high risk of being filmed or photographed, if only incidentally, during those weeks or months.
Children are very occasionally kidnapped, raped and murdered, in Cyprus as in England or any other country. Even more rarely – Myra Hindley and Ian Brady spring to mind – deranged psychopaths co-operate in such crimes. But organised paedophile rings kidnapping young children are vanishingly rare. Of course it does not mean that they could not exist. It does mean that we should be sceptical, and we should be especially wary of creating or stoking unjustified fears of people of different ethnicities or nationalities.
At present there seems virtually no evidence of a paedophile gang and a vast amount of speculation.
Unfortunately, such speculation is not always victimless. The least important, but still unfair, consequence is that hotel may lose business as a result. The management have been vigorously defending their establishment, and probably the storm will soon blow over without long term damage to its reputation.
Families holidaying with their children will relax a little bit less, and wrap their children in bubble-wrap just a little bit more than necessary as a result of the story.
But there is also a more lasting and insidious damage when stories like this are whipped up on the flimsiest of evidence. There are perfectly respectable reasons for wanting to control immigration, but protecting our children from rape and kidnap by Romanians is not one of them. As the Daily Mail comments show, stories like this help to fuel the belief that eastern Europe in general, and Romania in particular, is populated by criminals of a particularly nasty sort, and that if we do not throw them out, or at least prevent more of them coming to Britain, our children will not be safe.
That, of course, is unusually pernicious nonsense.
Fortunately Mr Williams-Thomas is on the case. We all look forward to hearing his findings.
Is this the same Mr. Williams-Thomas who just happens to run a Child Protection Agency, and who told The Sunday Times not so long ago that he charges £3,000 to £8,000 an HOUR for his talks, I wonder? (she scrolls up to look at photo again) Why, YES, I see it is!
I’m sure Lix McDuckingStool may well be joining him on the case pretty soon, then, we can look forward to another episode of their favourite morning show, where the two of them can ask for ‘more victims of Romanians’ to come forward, perhaps?
Interestingly, a certain band of Outlawyers also share the same offline publicity company as a certain morning tv show.
Perhaps this TV show might do a piece on ‘How To Start and Run Your Own Lynch Mob Child Protection Team’ ?
Fortunately Mr Williams-Thomas is on the case. We all look forward to hearing his findings.
What more is there to say ?
im fascinated with jaguar cars the Sidney Cooke gang drove, tanners breakers yard, the yachts i new those sort had ya know the sort Tories can afford in Southend area i know they moored up algarve region??? best say nought essex police get the hump on behalf vulnerable lgbti community sid was in.
It appears that hunting paedophiles, whether real or imaginary, is far more glamorous and undoubtably more lucrative than scraping chewing gum off the streets as Williams-Thomas has discovered.
oh hi its outlaw, my kosher friend oy vey, for once i tink daily mail, (my friendly stalkers) have hit nail on the head with lucien freud
I imagine it’s the Romany angle rather than the Romanian that is most significant in this nonsense, and it was the Authorities who seemed to be the #believers first.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24649430
As for the idiot guy, he’d believe anything if there was money in it for him.
I think you might well be right about that. People are rather inclined to mix up “Roma” and “Romanian”, and at least one person seems to have described a “gypsy” in the swimming pool.
Funnily enough I wrote about anti-gypsy prejudice a couple of years ago on this blog.
I can see why people get Roma and Romanians mixed up. After all, few can tell the difference between Austrians and Australians, can they?
…and letter boxes & Islamic garb can be very confusing, too !
jumping to conclusions, hmm ya mean like migrants can use race card to rape english children, women? just asking init. well meaning diversity misogynistic legal team defending the poor victim migrants ahh against the english females they evidently hate.
ahh of course the romany dont traffik children to the west for slavery, this ole nan ought to shut her fucking mouth, init, has barrister blogger tried to silence any rape victims for telling the truth i wonder?
This was a great read, both funny & frightening. People’s propensity for jumping to a wrong conclusion – and then being all too willing to resort to “vigilantism” off the back of it – is something I find quite disturbing, doubly so when the media fan the flames.
I had a disagreement with Exaro’s David Hencke over this matter. Unfortunately I seem to be ‘banned’ so the following article still has not been updated with the ‘bombshell revelation’ that its subject – an apparent hero to Hencke – predictably turned out to be less than squeaky clean himself:
“‘Paedophile hunter’ Joseph McCloskey (39) has been exposed as a career criminal with a total of 96 previous convictions, including four for indecency, as well as a host of others for drugs – including supplying Class A drugs – public order and road traffic offences.
The Limavady man’s 23-year criminal career emerged yesterday when he appeared at Londonderry Magistrates Court charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm in the city centre on September 20 last year.”
https://davidhencke.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/judge-bans-a-facebook-page-exposing-paedophiles-and-awards-20000-damages-to-convicted-sex-offender/
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/man-behind-facebook-page-that-named-and-shamed-child-sex-offenders-has-a-string-of-indecency-convictions-himself-31213993.html
Living in Spain I have ample opportunity to observe the sometimes contradictory nature of the Brit abroad’s attitude to children – quick to cast aspersions about “strangers” but happy to abandon them to their fate whilst they are getting wrecked at 11am in a “British bar”.
The natives seem largely not to have succumbed to the ‘paedo-hysteria’, although some recently spotted graffiti caused a weary sigh:
“P.P. [the governing Partido Popular] = Pedófilos y pederastas”
However, there was a strange case a year or two ago which caught my eye, and has inverted echoes of the Cyprus case: the ‘victim’ was a local boy of four & the ‘paedo’ was a sixty-year old holidaying British man.
Much as in the media reports from Cyprus, what appeared in the press really ought to have made people think twice before thinking the worst – it was the family who took the tale to the press, not, as is more usual, the police. The claim was that a weirdo had tried to abduct the small boy for the most terrible of reasons, but as with the “paedos infiltrate hotel waiting-staff” lunacy there was something not quite right about their story: would a shuffling man on holiday have been able to communicate with a four-year old (in Spanish, presumably), and was the boy’s recollection – according to his family, that is – of being threatened that if he didn’t go with the man he would be “thrown to the black dog”, really credible? Apparently so, as the comments sections soon erupted in righteous indignation.
The man had already been arrested by the time the story appeared, and it only appeared because the family were unhappy that he hadn’t been immediately jailed. Photos of the feared paedo were stuck up in lobbys by concerned citizens to warn parents that they had better be worried, and further reports of his being removed by police from his hotel when they decided he was no longer welcome followed (coincidentally the day that his expected-stay was due to come to an end).
And then the trail went cold. It took an English-language magazine (largely aimed at ex-pats rather than tourists) to bring a little sanity to proceedings by pointing out that the man in question had mental-health problems (which no doubt explained the police’s apparent reluctance to throw him in jail). Rather than a predator he was more likely a vulnerable person himself. The press who fanned the flames never did bother following up the story further (as there really wasn’t one) in much the same way as The Daily Mail & others will move on to the next terrifying tale without ever “confessing the truth” of the Cyprus case.
Only this past weekend my girlfriend & I were returning from the beach when I spotted a toddler, apparently on her own on a little plastic tricycle, absorbed in her own world playing between the parked cars of a plot which gave onto, firstly, some rocks & secondly straight into the sea. Being at a distance I didn’t immediately approach her but looked around to see where on earth the family was (she was Spanish, I think, so it’s a miracle I couldn’t hear them, even if not see them, ho ho ho!). Before too long they appeared (but from God knows where) so we went on our way. If they had not quickly materialized I would have asked her:
“Love, are you all alone? Where’s your family? [As I am concerned that a reversing car is not going to see you / you are about to climb those rocks you seem fascinated by & which are all that seperates you from a watery grave.]”
That thanks to the whipper-uppers of a disproportionate fear this could in the minds of some people be interpreted as the approach of a sick-minded child-snatcher is pretty depressing. But I’d rather have good intentions misinterpreted than live with the consequences of NOT having intervened when danger was present, so at least in my neck of the woods the parents can continue getting hammered – whilst their little tykes head towards the waves with only a pair of poorly-inflated “non life-saving” arm-bands to protect them – safe in the knowledge that THIS “stranger” will not be afraid to come to anyone’s aid, should it be necessary – or even just wise – to do so.
It’s awful that nowadays if you see a lost child many people’s first thought is not “how can I help her” but “what will people think if they see me holding a little girl’s hand?
Stories like this one from Cyprus add to that problem, which – notwithstanding Madeleine McCann – is arguably far greater than the incredibly remote risk of child kidnap.
Anyway, I’m glad to hear that you at least will help first and answer to the mob later.
jumping to conclusions, hmm ya mean like migrants can use race card to rape english children, women? just asking init. well meaning diversity misogynistic legal team defending the poor victim migrants ahh against the english females they evidently hate. i stopped at media fan the flames, coz usually its anti english, misogynistic pro pedo, hows the migrant the victim you cuck soy?
I know this area and holiday resort extremely well. It is the perfect place for a family holiday and has been safe for years in every sense of the word. The recent reports sadden me but they highlight the friction between the locals and EU immigrants in Cyprus. It is true that crime has increased and this year for the first time I have seen actual real life police on patrol. We are unfortunately now used to petty crime and whereas homes, cars and belongings could be left unsecured, that is not the case now. I sincerely hope there all is well and that this is just scaremongers because unfortunately I don’t think the police have the expertise to deal with this.
What an interesting example of mass hysteria.
I am reminded of the terrible character assassination of news-reader Julia Somerville whose innocent shots of her child in the bath were ‘intercepted’ by a hypersensitive member of staff in the local film processors (Boots I think) in 1995 which resulted in a full police investigation and just about the end of her career for no good reason other than wrongful suspicion.
I mention this because something similar nearly happened to me. I am a ‘senior citizen’ and eight years ago my wife and myself were on holiday and touring the North East. We had stopped off at Alnmouth for lunch at a picnic spot in the park near the ‘Marina’ there. Around the corner came a curious sight, a specially made tandem pram with six toddlers on it having a whale of a time. It was pushed by a middle-aged lady sporting a t-shirt with the name of some local nursery emblazoned on the front and an ‘outrider’ from the same nursery walking alongside.
As they passed we smiled and got a smile back. I then went to the car for my camera to record the strange object to show my daughter who had just had twins and had been looking for a twin pushchair.
By the time I got back the multi-pram was a hundred yards away but I took a quick snap anyway. Immediately the ‘outrider’ became hysterical started waving her arms about and ran back towards me. No! No! Not allowed! She accosted me as though I was some paedophile pervert. The fact that my wife was with me made no difference at all. She told me that I had to give her the camera. I told her that wasn’t going to happen. She demanded that I must delete all the photos. I asked what harm could come of taking a long-distance photograph of six babies in a pram. She became hysterical. My wife tried to calm her down but she was having none of it. When she said she was going to call the police I realised that something similar to the Romanian episode above was going to transpire so I quickly gave her the camera. She couldn’t use it so I helped her through the process. She checked all my recent photos and then made me delete the single photo of the pram in front of her.
I realised then just how utterly irrational this stranger-danger fear had become and that once the ball was set in motion there was absolutely no possibility of debate. Obviously this woman would return to the nursery and fill out a report to the effect that a paedophile had tried to take photos of the babies in her charge and that she had stopped him! Another false-positive in the general assumption that abductors of children are everywhere. Undoubtedly with regard to holiday spots this idea has been fanned by the media in relation to the constant publicity surrounding Madeleine McCann and this has been multiplied by the (false) threats posed by exaggerated fears about criminal immigrants from Eastern Europe. I can see where the recent ‘people-trafficking’ and ‘Easter European sex-rings’ would also dovetail into the worst fears of the simple-minded. There are so many people responsible, I don’t know who to blame for all this, but opportunists like Mark Williams-Thomas have a lot to answer for.
Simon
Thanks for this Simon. Glad you escaped unscathed.
Are you ready for this? Melanie Shaw describing the UK care system as being than any WWII atrocity. Beheadings, Waterboarding, unspeakable acts of Torture. I shit you not. One for MWT I think.
My friend was verbally abused by a passer-by whilst photographic a derelict seaside fun fair on wet weekday morning. The man used the most foul and abusive language as well as threats of violence because there was a ‘paedo with a camera looking for f’ing kids’.
My friend returned home a changed person. His enthusiasm for photography and social history gone. He’s lost faith in his fellow man and feels vulnerable in public places so no longer goes out for walks on nice days or visits places he thinks might ‘be trouble’.
Ah yes, Mr Thomas who – I kid you not – went on live TV and said “facebook is perfectly safe” despite the fact its known for being home to tens, if not hundreds of thousands of paedo groups!
[Edited]
Frankly, the man is a joke. He jumps on any cause, claims to be ‘independent’ but still has connections to Scotland Yard which he uses for…everything he does.
Without state funded assistance, ie; uniformed officers tipping him off, or directly providing him what he needs, he would be clueless.
Yes. Best he gets back to chewing gum removal. Or perhaps he could try blackmail.
W
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