Freddy Peats died

| 04 April 2005 18:20 IST

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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