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'I have known about Jersey paedophiles for 15 years,' says award-winning journalist
The award-winning journalist who exposed terrible abuse in Islington children's homes now reveals horrifying links to sinister discoveries at Jersey's Haut de la Garenne.
I met the frightened policeman at an isolated country restaurant, many miles from his home and station. Detective Constable Peter Cook had finally despaired, and decided to blow the whistle to a reporter.
He was risking his career, so made me scribble my notes into a tiny pad beneath the tablecloth.
He had uncovered a vicious child sex ring, with victims in both Britain and the Channel Islands, and he wanted me to get his information to police abuse specialists in London.
Incredibly, he claimed that his superiors had barred him from alerting them.
He feared a cover-up: many ring members were powerful and wealthy. But I did not think him paranoid: I specialised in exposing child abuse scandals and knew, from separate sources, of men apparently linked to this ring.
They included an aristocrat, clerics and a social services chief. Their friends included senior police officers.
Repeatedly, inquiries by junior detectives were closed down, so I, a journalist, was asked to convey confidential information from one police officer to others. It seemed surreal.
I duly met trusted contacts at the National Criminal-Intelligence Squad. That was more than 12 years ago, and little happened - until now.
Last weekend, a child's remains were found at a former children's home on Jersey amid claims of a paedophile ring.
More than 200 children who lived at Haut de la Garenne have described horrific sexual and physical torture dating back to the Sixties.
When I heard the news, my eyes filled with tears. I felt heartbroken, not least at my own powerlessness. I have known for more than 15 years about Channel Islands paedophiles victimising children in the British care system.
I was relieved that the truth was finally emerging. But I felt devastated. Children had probably been murdered. I had so not wanted to be right.
I stood outside the forbidding Victorian building of Haut de la Garenne this week and watched grim-faced police in blue plastic forensic suits hunt its bricked-up secret basements for children's bones.
Outside, a large cross commemorates the 35 former residents who died fighting for their country: "Their names liveth forever." Oh yes?
What are the names of the children whose bodies may now be dug up - and why did no one miss and search for them earlier? Jersey's residents and political class must ask these questions.
Disturbing allegations about the murder of children in care have characterised other scandals I investigated in Britain, but today I can reveal for the first time the links between the abuse I uncovered at care homes in Islington, North London, and the horrifying discoveries on Jersey.
I have never before written that 14-year-old Jason Swift, killed in 1985 by a paedophile gang, is believed to have lived in Islington council's Conewood Street home.
Two sources claimed this when I investigated Islington's 12 care homes for The Mail on Sunday's sister paper, the London Evening Standard, in the early Nineties.
But hundreds of children's files mysteriously disappeared in Islington and, without documentation, this was not evidence enough.
We did, however, prove that every home included staff who were paedophiles, child pornographers or pimps. Concerned police secretly confirmed that several Islington workers were believed "networkers", major operators in the supply of children for abuse and pornography.
Some of these were from the Channel Islands or regularly took Islington children there on unofficial visits. In light of the grisly discoveries at Haut de la Garenne, the link now seems significant, but at the time we were so overwhelmed by abuse allegations nearer home that this connection never emerged.
What we did report prompted the sort of vehement official denials that have come to characterise child abuse claims. Margaret Hodge, then council leader, denounced us as Right-wing "gutter journalists" who supposedly bribed children to lie.
Our findings were eventually vindicated by Government-ordered inquiries, and two British Press Awards. Yet I knew we had only scraped the surface of Islington's corruption.
Now Jersey police under deputy chief Lenny Harper - a 'new broom' outsider - have been secretly investigating a paedophile ring linked to the island's care homes for months, I have been struck by common factors with the British abuse scandals: innocent-sounding sailing trips, where children can be isolated and abused, away from prying eyes, then delivered to other abusers; the familiar smearing of whistle-blowers; and the suppression of damning reports.
Jersey social worker Simon Bellwood was sacked early last year after speaking out, and popular health minister Stuart Syvret, 42, was fired in November after publicising the suppressed Sharp Report into abuse allegations.
"The smears on me are water off a duck's back," this brave man told me yesterday in a St Helier cafe. But his hands shook.
I have never assumed that the officials, politicians and police who cover up abuse scandals are all paedophiles, nor does Syvret.
"They just want a quiet life and their competency unquestioned. I'm angrier with them than the abusers, and want several prosecuted for obstructing the course of justice. The police are considering charges," he added.
Traditionally, police fear paedophile ring inquiries as expensive and unproductive. Traumatised witnesses can be hazy and collapse under cross-examination.
Convictions are rare. Police therefore raid suspected abusers for paedophile pornography, which more easily yields convictions.
Well - in theory. In June 1991, police in Cambridgeshire raided the home of Neil Hocquart who abused children in Britain and Guernsey and, with a social worker from Jersey, supplied child pornography for a huge sex ring.
It should have been a major breakthrough. But, as DC Cook told me, it went horribly wrong.
A handful of child sex-ring victims become "recruiters". They are not beaten but rewarded with gifts,
money and 'love'. In return, their job is to procure other victims. Such a man, my whistle-blower believed, was Neil Frederick Hocquart.
Hocquart, original surname Foster, was abused while in care in Norfolk and was eventually 'befriended' by an older man, merchant seaman Captain H. Hocquart of Vale, in Guernsey, whose surname he adopted.
Captain Hocquart was not the only Channel Islands man with an interest in children in care. Satan worshipper Edward Paisnel, "The Beast of Jersey", was given a 30-year sentence in 1971 on 13 counts of raping girls and boys. The building contractor fostered children and played Father Christmas at Haut de la Garenne in the Sixties.
Cambridgeshire police, in a joint operation with Scotland Yard's Obscene Publications Squad (now the Paedophile Unit), raided Neil Hocquart's Swaffham Manor home in June 1991.
They found more than 100 child-sex videos and 300 photographs of children. At nearby Ely they found his friend, Walter Clack, trying to dispose of a sick home video of a middle-aged man abusing a boy.
Who were the children in these films and photos? Police needed properly to question these men. But they never got the chance.
Hocquart secretly took an overdose of anti-depressant dothiepin and died at Addenbrooke's Hospital soon after his arrest. Was his suicide a last act of loyalty?
DC Cook told me incredulously that a senior officer broke with normal procedure and informed Clack, before he was questioned, that the other suspect was dead. Clack then blamed the dead man for everything, and escaped with a £5,000 fine - and inherited one third of Hocquart's wealth, at his bequest.
Wills featured strongly in the fortunesof the Islington and Channel Islands paedophiles. Police discovered that Neil Hocquart inherited his wealth from the Guernsey sea captain.
But Captain Hocquart possibly paid dearly for befriending orphans: he died soon after making out his will in the younger man's favour.
Scotland Yard detectives told me they found at least "two or three" wills of older men who died of apparent heart attacks shortly after leaving everything to Neil Hocquart.
The officers cheerfully called him a "murderer". These deaths were never investigated: the suspect, after all, was now also dead.
Hocquart wasn't the only person in his circle to become rich this way. A Jersey-born friend of Hocquart's, who started his childcare career on the island before becoming a key supplier of children from Islington's care homes to paedophile rings, similarly inherited a fortune.
Nicholas John Rabet was for many years deputy superintendent of Islington council's home at 114 Grosvenor Avenue.
He and a colleague, another single man later barred from social work by the Department of Health, both took children on unauthorised trips to Jersey. Allegations mounted but nothing was done.
Rabet's opportunities to obtain victims massively increased after he befriended the widow of an American oil millionaire. She died after rewriting her will in his favour.
He inherited her manor house at Cross in Hand near Heathfield, Sussex, where he opened a children's activity centre, and regularly invited children in Islington's care to stay.
Hocquart spent £13,000 on quad bikes for the centre, called The Stables, and he and Walter Clack became "volunteers" there.
Hocquart befriended one young boy and took him on a sailing trip, where there would be little risk of being spotted. Police found disturbing film from the trip of men spraying the naked child with water.
But Hocquart left the boy another third of his money, and he denied abuse when questioned.
Police also found at Hocquart's home naked photos of a boy of about ten, whom they learned was in the care of Islington social services. I shall call him Shane.
Sussex police raided Rabet's children's centre. But he had plenty of warning and, they believed, emptied it of child pornography. However officers still found a "shrine to boys", with suggestive photographs everywhere, including pictures of Shane.
They approached Shane, at his Islington children's home. He tearfully confirmed months of abuse. But their attempts to investigate further were thwarted by Islington Council.
Many professionals had, for years, expressed grave fears about Rabet, and put their concerns in writing. But Islington falsely told Sussex officers it had no file material on Rabet or his alleged victim.
Staff had in fact been ordered to find the complaints and deliver them to the office of Lyn Cusack, Islington's assistant director of social services - but they were handed over to Sussex police only when I revealed their existence.
Islington's appalling mishandling of vital records was highlighted by the independent White inquiry into the abuse in Islington children's homes, which found that "at assistant director level . . . many confidential files were destroyed by mistake, although there is no evidence of conspiracy."
During the investigation into Rabet, Islington also refused to interview any other children in care, or, scandalously, help Sussex police identify other children in Rabet's photos.
With only Shane's evidence to rely on, police decided not to prosecute.
I traced Shane. He was furious that Rabet was never prosecuted, but not surprised. "This goes right to the top," he said, "You have no idea how big this is."
He showed me photos of another victim, a young Turkish boy with a sweet shy smile whom Rabet also regularly took from the Islington home to spend weekends at his manor house.
Shane didn't know where the boy was now, he just disappeared. I was never able to find the boy, either. Many children in care are missed by no one.
I retraced Shane two years ago to tell him that justice had finally caught up with Rabet. Third World police had succeeded where Britain's finest in Cambridgeshire, Sussex, London and Jersey had failed.
Rabet fled to Thailand's notorious child sex resort of Pattaya after the White inquiry. He was arrested there in spring 2006 and charged with abusing 30 boys, some as young as six.
Thai police believed he had abused at least 300. But he was never tried: on May 12, 2006, Rabet died of an overdose at the age of 57.
Two other Jersey-born social workers, who for legal reasons I cannot name, also worked in Islington and later with young offenders.
One arranged more of those mysterious sailing trips to Guernsey, the other sent children to Rabet's centre. Both were accused of abuse.
In 1995, we reinvestigated Rabet and met DC Cook at the restaurant. He had gone through Hocquart's papers, investigated other members of the paedophile ring and met their victims. He was horrified at what he discovered.
One man, for example, married a single mother purely so he could abuse her two young sons.
"He told these poor children to keep quiet, that their mother had been lonely so long they would ruin her life if they said anything," the officer told me.
The vicar who married them knew the groom was a paedophile but did not care: he was one too, and got his victims from a British care home.
DC Cook travelled to Guernsey, which Hocquart regularly visited. There local CID officers drove him round, and he met two brothers whom Hocquart abused, then delivered them to a high-ranking, respected local man to rape.
DC Cook traced another distraught victim in England who provided invaluable information about the man, based in Wales, who copied the ring's child pornography for distribution.
This man clearly needed his door kicked in by police, as did Hocquart's other contacts in Britain and the Channel Islands. But no action was taken.
Then word came from on high to drop his inquiries. DC Cook accepted that there might be an innocent explanation - that his local force might not want the financial burden of a national investigation.
But he became deeply troubled when told not to forward his vital intelligence to specialist officers elsewhere.
Britain's new National Criminal Intelligence Squad (NCIS) had the job of disseminating intelligence on paedophiles across the country. Would I, asked the troubled officer, take his information to the squad's Paedophile Unit for him?
And so we pretended to share a meal while I secretly scribbled down the names, addresses, dates of birth and believed victims of dozens of suspects.
My diary records that I met NCIS on January 4, 1996, at 10.30am, and I also channelled the intelligence to Scotland Yard. Neither, unfortunately, had the power to make local forces take action, so I was not optimistic.
This was not the first time I had acted as a go-between. In 1994, another police officer was barred from investigating a paedophile ring, which included an Islington social worker of Channel Islands origin.
We alerted Scotland Yard. This man was, I learned, involved with five overlapping paedophile rings - but he has never been convicted.
Peter Cook has now retired and agreed to go on the record. He told me the partner of Hocquart's video producer was eventually imprisoned for abusing his own sons. "But we could have stopped so much else, so much earlier," he said.
"The news from Jersey is horrifying. I've thought of Rabet all week. The hierarchy does not like these inquiries, they're expensive and produce embarrassment, so people shove it all under the carpet, they don't want to know even when children are dying.
"There will be people now crawling out claiming they were always worried. What cowards, what bastards!"
Jersey police confirmed this week it was aware of Nick Rabet and keen to learn more about his friends. Peter Cook told me: "I will help all I can."
Michael Hames, the former head of Scotland Yard's Obscene Publications Squad, once told me that he never doubted paedophiles were killing children in care.
But the climate of disbelief was fierce, and he asked sadly: "What police chief will dare risk his career by hiring JCBs [to search for the bodies]?"
Courageous Ulsterman Lenny Harper has. Deposed Jersey health minister Stuart Syvret told me: "My family has lived here since William the Conqueror. But if an indigenous police officer were in charge, this investigation would never have happened. Jersey is an oligarchy, where the elite look after each other."
When I flew home late last night, in time for Mother's Day, I felt utter relief.
This tiny island with its high-hedged lanes looked so pretty when the police series Bergerac was filmed here, but to me said just one thing: that there is no escape from here for a terrified child.
If witnesses who want, finally, to help these tragically un-mothered children, now is the time to speak out.
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(more)Proms 'don't promote new British values'
Last Updated: 10:01am GMT 04/03/2008
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Margaret Hodge, the culture minister will today criticise the Prom concerts, claiming they attract a narrow audience and fail to promote new British values.
(more)3.45 pm GMT update
PM praises Proms after minister's attack
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guardian.co.uk, Tuesday March 4 2008 Article history · Contact us
Downing Street has issued a swift slap-down of comments made by culture minister Margaret Hodge that the Proms fail to promote a broader participation in British culture.
Members of the Association of Chief Police Officers' homicide working group will soon submit a report on where the inquiry should be focused.
The whistleblower's story
Paul Harris and Martin Bright investigate how a 12-year-old saga of child abuse and cover-ups has returned to haunt Children's Minister Margaret Hodge
Paul Harris and Martin Bright
The Observer, Sunday July 6 2003
Liz Davies remembers the moment when she realised that she had a scandal on her hands. For several months she had been talking to groups of children she suspected were being abused. Then, one day, two young boys walked into her small council office in Islington.
One of the boys looked afraid, but the other reassured him. 'It's all right,' he said 'She's not one of them.' It was those chilling words that gave Davies her first hint that much of the horrible child abuse she was uncovering was happening within the care system of Islington Council - the very organisation meant to protect the borough's most vulnerable children.
That was in April 1990. The scandal would eventually explode into the national consciousness two-and-a-half years later in a series of exposés in London's Evening Standard. They described a care system penetrated by paedophiles that had abysmally failed to care for scores of children. The council, then led by Margaret Hodge, appointed last month as the country's first Minister for Children, initially condemned thestories, for which Davies and several other social workers acted as anonymous whistleblowers.
Although police investigations dismissed claims of a paedophile ring operating in Islington, allegations of child abuse at the children's home on Hodge's watch were borne out by official inquiries. Hodge's name would forever be associated with one of Britain's most notorious child abuse scandals.
Now the scandal has reared its head again. Hodge's appointment sparked a furious campaign by the Standard and other newspapers to have her resign. She indicated this weekend that she was determined to face down the calls for her resignation: 'There is no way that I am going to walk away from this job after just two weeks. It's an incredibly challenging and important post and I want to be allowed to get on with the day job.'
Yet the clamour for her to quit was yesterday growing as, 12 years on, Davies is once again at the centre of the scandal. Shedding the cloak of anonymity, she gave her first full interview to The Observer this weekend to speak about the genesis of an affair that is now threatening the future of yet another of Tony Blair's Ministers.
Davies had been working out of the Irene Watson Neighbourhood Office for several years when she and her co-workers noticed a sudden increase in the number of children visiting them. Situated in the Hornsey area of north London, a mixed area of middle-class homes and desperately poor council estates, the office was responsible for a warren of inner-city streets. The teenagers, who had clearly slept on the streets and were involved in petty crime, would be waiting for them each morning. 'It was like a queue,' she said.
That was late in 1989. After several months, as trust between Davies and the children grew, their stories began to emerge. The picture was of terribly damaged young people, often with a history of depression and attempted suicide. Then other stories began to emerge: of sinister adults preying on children who were lured into private houses or abused in care homes, which were being used as under-age brothels. Davies and several other care workers became convinced a paedophile ring was at work in the area.
In 1990 Davies's colleague, David Cofie, raised the issue at a forum of local residents. He also took his claims direct to Hodge, who was the local ward councillor. Davies asked for more resources to tackle the problem, but Hodge turned the request down.'She only cared about the budget,' Davies said. In May, senior council officers told Davies, Cofie and others working with them to stop their investigations. 'They said it was an exaggeration. I was stunned,' Davies said.
They carried on their work. They interviewed children as individual cases and privately built up a picture of widespread abuse, which they said was being carried out by a network of abusers. They wrote 15 separate reports, but said their warnings still went unheeded, even as they uncovered appallingly serious allegations. 'There is a lot that I just can't ever speak about,' Davies said.
Certainly official reports carried out in the wake of the scandal being made public paint a picture of terrible dilapidation in Islington's care system. One report, dated February 1993 and obtained by The Observer, describes a care home of dirt, peeling plaster, mattresses for beds and no security. 'Nothing could have prepared us fully for what we encountered inside. We were devastated,' the report's authors wrote.
But, even as they uncovered stories of children being taken away by adults on weekend trips to the country or being placed in homes with suspected abusers, Davies said her team's work was ignored. It took a toll on her mental health. The final straw came when a seven-year-old boy was placed in a home run by someone she had already warned about. 'I remember seeing that child cowering in a corner inside that home,' she said 'That was enough.'
She was already having nightmares and she got a new job outside the borough by February 1992. But she could not forget the things she had witnessed. She, and others, went to the press. By the end of the year the Islington child abuse scandal was the talk of the nation.
Margaret Hodge also says she remembers things clearly. She recalls the first time Cofie came to her with his reports of a paedophile ring, including suspicions that one was operating from a house in her own Islington council ward. She says she acted in the correct manner. Cofie was the senior children's social worker in the area and someone whose opinion she respected. He said up to 14 children were being abused at the house and they should be taken into care immediately.
A memo produced by the Evening Standard last week showed that Hodge questioned providing extra resources for the investigation after the police found no evidence of abuse. 'David Cofie came to me, and of course I was petrified,' Hodge told The Observer. But the Children's Minister claims she did everything in her power to investigate the claims. 'The famous memo itself says we activated the area child protection procedures and I remember there was a sur veillance of the house for up to six months. Every child that went into that house was interviewed.'
Despite all the interviews and investigations, Hodge was told there was no evidence to substantiate the allegations. 'I know [Cofie] was upset. I know he thought he was right. But in that instance I think we did everything absolutely right. I don't think we did a thing wrong.'
Davies admits it is possible Hodge was not told the details of what she was reporting. 'I had little direct contact with her. It is possible that no one was telling her what we were telling them,' she said. If that is the case, then there are serious questions still to be asked of the role of senior staff at Islington social services and in particular John Rea Price, the Director of Social Services, who became Director of the National Children's Bureau in 1992. Despite several attempts by The Observer to contact him last week, Price has consistently refused to comment on events in Islington. He now works as an inspector of prisons for the Home Office, where he specialises in Young Offender Institutions.
Hodge knows that as council leader she must ultimately shoulder the blame for what happened in Islington in the 1980s and 90s. The final investigation into the scandal, carried out for Islington by the head of Oxfordshire Social Services, Ian White, in 1995 concluded that there was no evidence of a network of paedophiles or ritual abuse. But on the children's homes issue it was damning. 'It is apparent... that the London Borough of Islington did not in most cases undertake the standard investigative processes that should have been triggered whenever they occurred. It is possible, therefore, that some staff now not in the employment of Islington could be working in the field of social services with a clean disciplinary record and yet have serious allegations still not investigated in their history.' The council was ordered to write to all social services departments nationally to warn them to check their records for ex-Islington staff.
Most seriously, it also reported that there was a culture that tolerated relationships between care staff and teenage boys. It also blocked the investigation of people from gay or ethnic backgrounds. 'This is a recipe for disaster,' the report said. The report concluded that the ultimate responsibility for the disaster within social services lay with the council and senior officers. The buck ultimately stopped with Hodge, who had been council leader since 1982.
Hodge's successor as council leader, Derek Sawyer, who commissioned the White Report, said Hodge had done everything she could at the time. 'The reality is that Margaret and the council did take seriously allegations of abuse, always referred them to the police. Obviously there were real problems with the children's homes, and that was exposed. But there has also been a settling of old scores, which has been regrettable.'
But Davies, who now works as a lecturer at London Metropolitan University, is determined that Hodge should go. 'What are all those young people feeling now when they hear about who is the new Minister for Children?', she said.
antiaristo wrote:Margaret Hodge covered all this up when leader of Islington Council. Today she sits in Gordon Brown's Cabinet as Culture Secretary.
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