Rape/murder case of Arab-Israeli student in Melbourne ends with guilty plea
By Clyde Hughes
(UPI) -- An Australian man who killed an Arab-Israeli exchange student pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges of rape and murder.
Codey Herrmann entered the plea in an Australian courtroom, admitting guilt in the January death of Aiia Maasarwe as she returned from a comedy show in Melbourne. Maasarwe was talking with her sister when she was attacked. The 21-year-old's body was found hours later near a tram depot.
Police arrested Herrmann, 20, who was homeless at the time, after a brief investigation and manhunt. He will be sentenced in October.
Maasarwe was a student at La Trobe University in Melbourne for five months as an exchange from Shanghai University in China.
"What he did to Aiia wasn't human," father Saeed Maarsarwe said at her memorial service. "She was always smiling, she loved people. She had an open mind and wanted to learn about new cultures. I wanted to be with her longer, but now that's impossible. I pray that she is with God in heaven."
Maasarwe's death spurred protest from thousands in Australia calling for authorities to do more to ensure women are protected. More than 3,000 participated in the Sydney Women's March shortly after the student's death.
Muslim indicted in barbaric rape of 7-y/o Jewish girl in Samaria
BY BTNEWSA Muslim child rapist resident of the Palestinian Authority has been charged with kidnapping and raping a 7-year-old Israeli girl whom he had met at the school where he was employed as a janitor.
Police said the Muslim had groomed the little girl, engaging her in conversation and giving her candy for a long time before committing the barbaric attack.
One day, the rapist took the child to a house near the school and raped her.
The child “cried and called for help,” according to the indictment, and was released by the attacker following the rape.
The indictment was filed after an investigation that lasted several months, conducted by Shai District Police.
Chaim Bleicher of the legal aid organization Honenu, who is representing the child’s family, said several Muslim laborers were present during the rape and provided assistance to the rapist, but this was not noted in the indictment.
Update: New details were revealed on Monday about the horrific kidnapping and rape of a 7-year-old Jewish girl by a 46-year-old Muslim terrorist who was employed as a janitor at her school.
During the rape, the little girl screamed and called for help, but was held down by two other Muslims who helped the terrorist rape her.
Face of evil – The 46-year-old Muslim terrorist has been identified as Mahmoud Katusa, from the Arab village of Deir Qadis near Ramallah.
Following an extensive, months-long investigation, authorities filed the indictment Sunday, charging the suspect with aggravated sexual assault and kidnapping.
Samaria
Teen ‘sexual cult’ in Ontario foster home known to Children’s Aid Society, victim says
After two stories last week criticizing Australia's child care system
- I get to criticize one closer to home.
By Alexandra Mazur and Kraig Krause Global News
ABOVE: Stories from an eastern Ontario foster home show that teens were being taken advantage of and, allegedly, nothing was being done to stop it.
M.K. had been previously sexually abused when she arrived at the Holms’ as a foster child, hoping to find a safe, stable home. Instead, her stay turned into a nightmare. The couple groomed her under the guise of trying to heal her. They dressed her up, made her watch porn, and eventually she was sexually assaulted by Joe.
M.K’s story is not unique. The Holms would eventually be convicted of treating the wards in their care as sexual playthings. Joe pleaded guilty to the sexual assaults of three foster girls in the home, and Janet pleaded guilty to one count of sexual exploitation, one count of permitting a person under 18 to engage in sexual activity in her home and one count of possession of child pornography in relation to three foster children in the home. Both were sentenced to jail in 2011.
In typical Canadian fashion, sentences were very light even though this should have been considered aggravated child sexual assault. Both have been out of jail for several years.
A Global News investigation shows what happened at the Holm house was not an isolated case, but one of several foster homes chosen by the now-defunct Prince Edward County Children’s Aid Society where foster parents were convicted of abusing children between 2002 and 2010.
Some say the abuse discovered in foster homes across the county went undetected for so long due to systemic failures at the Prince Edward County Children’s Aid Society. The judge who presided over the Holms’ criminal case called the abuse so outrageous that he hoped a public inquiry would be launched.
In April 2018, three years after the last conviction in the Prince Edward County abuse cases, OPP charged the former executive director of Prince Edward County Children’s Aid Society, Bill Sweet, with 10 counts of neglect and 10 counts failing to provide the necessities of life.
Bill Sweet, former Prince Edward County Children’s Aid executive director, is facing charges of negligence and failure to provide the necessities of life.
Sgt. Carolle Dionne, provincial media relations coordinator, said when Sweet was charged, he never fostered any children of his own, but oversaw a Children’s Aid Society where several foster children were abused.
His preliminary hearing begins next month.
“Mr. Sweet intends to vigorously defend these charges. It would be inappropriate for him to comment further,” said his lawyer William MacDowell.
Meanwhile, the situation begs the question: has Children’s Aid done enough to ensure something like this never happens again?
What happened at the Holms’ house? Please follow the link for the rest of this disturbing article.
'Someday I will get found and locked up': Inside the global fight against online child sex abuse
By Lucy Cormack
The grainy photograph looked innocent enough. In the centre a young Filipina sports a toothy grin. She's about five or six years old, and is resting her head on the shoulder of an older, white man, who is cocking his own head towards her as they smile for the camera.
The pair is seated at what looks like a kitchen table, the young girl clutching the man's forearm with her tiny hands, as a grandchild might their elder.
Exhibits seized from the home in the Philippines, including the photo.
On September 8, 2016, officers from Visayan Field Unit of the Philippine National Police (PNP) storm a home in Cordova on Mactan Island, the most densely populated island in the Philippines, less than a kilometre from the province of Cebu. Once known for its fishing industry, Cebu is more now commonly known as one of south-east Asia’s hubs for child exploitation, and Cordova is considered the global epicentre of “pay-per-view” online child exploitation.
In the Cordova home, PNP officers have found twin girls aged 11, their seven-year-old sister, and their brother, aged nine, as well as their two parents.
They have also discovered the photograph.
The home that was raided in Cordova.
The origin of the investigation stretches more than 4000 kilometres south, to the Queensland home of an unrelated alleged offender, where members of Queensland Police's specialist child abuse unit, Task Force Argos, conducted a raid 10 months earlier.
During that raid, Argos officers seized a large quantity of child pornography stored on a number of electronic devices. Examination of the material revealed it had likely originated in the Philippines, prompting a referral to members of the Australian Federal Police’s Manila post and local PNP officers, who launched their own investigation.
At the Cordova raid, Filipino authorities took the four children living at the property into protective custody, arrested their mother and seized a number of items, including a hard drive, a black Canon camera, and the photograph of the Filipina girl - one of the twins - and the man.
The question now for investigators: who was he?
'It’s quite insidious'
Matthias Wolfgang Baden knew the writing was on the wall. For almost five years the 58-year-old electrical engineer had been in regular text and video communication with two Filipina girls. It was a relationship facilitated by the girls' mother.
The language used and the videos shared with the children were sordid, illicit and disturbing, and he knew it.
Six months later Baden would be in police custody, charged with a number of offences including the possession of child exploitation material and the persistent sexual abuse of two children.
In May this year Baden was sentenced to a maximum of 11 years and four months in prison, with a non-parole period of seven years and four months, after pleading guilty to his offences at the end of last year.
It is the second time Baden has landed behind bars, after he was sentenced to a minimum of two years in a South Australian jail in 1992 for having unlawful sexual intercourse with his 13-year-old stepdaughter.
The 58-year-old from Tregear, in western Sydney, was arrested at his home in September 2016 after AFP investigators successfully identified him as the man in the photograph found in Cordova only five days earlier.
He had been targeted for using the video-communication platform Skype to maintain an ongoing relationship with two children over a period of almost five years, commencing when they were aged two and seven. Using web-based chat and live-stream video, Baden maintained contact with the children, as facilitated by their mother, conducting conversations involving highly sexualised content.
Between 2012 and 2016 he paid the children’s mother more than $26,000 in various instalments.
“I’ve been in the team for about four years and we’ve had at least six or seven matters of this nature,” says federal agent Nicole Whelan, of the AFP's Joint Anti-Child Exploitation Team.
“Incredibly poor and very vulnerable” is the classic profile of the family so often on the other side of such an arrangement, in which young children are sexually exploited online in exchange for money from a foreign customer, a practice now defined by authorities as “live distance child abuse”.
Investigators say the scale of live distance abuse is difficult to quantify, and the crime itself is increasingly difficult to prosecute because video footage from real-time streaming apps such as Skype or Viber is not screen captured or stored.
Like in the case of Baden, “the nature of the application he was using was such we didn’t actually manage to obtain much of the video”, says Whelan, adding that investigators were able obtain chat records from which they could deduce what the children were likely doing on screen.
A photograph taken of Matthias Baden's premises.
The victims of Australian offenders are most commonly located in south-east Asia, with a predominant number of offenders targeting the Philippines, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. Offenders in the region most likely originate from Australia or the United States, followed by Canada and the UK, however local investigators also report cases involving offenders from Germany, France and Brazil.
There is more on this story on the Sydney Morning Herald
Child sexual abuse accused kills self in Mumbai court
Ada Khan, The Hindu
Was under trial for assaulting five-year-old boy
A 21-year-old man who was being tried in a child sexual abuse case committed suicide at the Sessions Court in Dindoshi on Saturday afternoon.
According to the Kurar police, the accused, Vikas Pawar, was arrested by the Powai police on December 9, 2015 for allegedly sexually assaulting a five-year-old boy. He was charged with unnatural intercourse under the Indian Penal Code along with relevant sections of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.
After his police custody period expired, Pawar was remanded in judicial custody and was lodged in the Arthur Road central jail in Kalachowkie while the case went to trial. Personnel from the Local Arms (LA) unit would escort him to and from court hearings every time.
“Pawar was brought to the Dindoshi court to attend a hearing on Saturday and after it was over, he was being escorted out of the court premises when he took the extreme step,” Deputy Commissioner of Police (Zone XII) Vinay Kumar Rathod said.
Pawar was rushed to the Shatabdi Hospital in Kandivali where he was declared dead before admission. Meanwhile, police personnel on duty at the court also informed the Kurar police, as the court falls under their jurisdiction. A team was sent to the court to conduct inquiries, while another team reached the hospital.
“No suicide note was found on Pawar’s person and, according to inquiries so far, he did not display any signs of suicidal behaviour recently,” Mr. Rathod said.
The police have registered an Accidental Death Report in the incident and are recording statements from the LA staff who were escorting him.
The police will also be conducting inquiries with his family members and personnel at the Arthur Road jail to check if he seemed unusually disturbed the last time they saw him.
The prison staff, meanwhile, will be making inquiries with his fellow inmates and will also be checking for any possible harassment from inmates or prison staff that might have triggered Pawar’s extreme step.
Dindoshi, Mumbai
Schoolgirls for sale: why Tokyo struggles to stop
the 'JK business'
the 'JK business'
The persistent practice of paying underage girls for sex-related services, known in Japan as the ‘JK’ business, has seen charities step in where police have come up short
Tash Reith-Banks in TokyoGuardian Tokyo week
A young woman hovers in the doorway of one of Kabukicho’s information centres, which give recommendations for bars and sex shops. Photograph: Kosuke Okahara/The Guardian
In a grubby shopfront a perky cartoon featuring a cute Mr Men-style creature offers part-time work. The ad, which has an alarmingly catchy jingle, doesn’t specify what the work is, but it doesn’t need to: the answer is all around us on the brightly lit billboards advertising the charms of male and female bar hosts.
We almost allow men to say ‘yeah, I’m attracted to young children’
Tokyo is famous for its fairly wild red light scene. You can find anything from a handsome man to make you cry and wipe away your tears to a maid to pour your drinks and giggle at your jokes and an encounter in one of the notorious “soapland” brothels.
You can also pay to spend time with a schoolgirl. Services might include a chat over a cup of tea, a walk in the park or perhaps a photograph – with some places offering rather more intimate options.
Or at least, you can for now – unless the people inside the garish pink bus have their way.
Colabo’s pink bus, part of the the charity’s effort to reach out to vulnerable school-age girls.
Photograph: The Asahi Shimbun/The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images
Photograph: The Asahi Shimbun/The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images
“JK business scouts tend to be men in their 20s and 30s,” says Yumeno Nito of Colabo. “They are very aware of trends and are good at knowing the girls’ economic status by looking at their clothes and makeup.” Poverty and low self-esteem are often factors in the manipulation of young girls by scouts, Nito says.
The fetishisation of Japanese schoolgirls in Japanese culture has been linked by some academics to a 1985 song called Please Don’t Take Off My School Uniform, released by the female idol group O-nyanko Club, and re-released by no less mainstream a group than AKB48, one of the highest-earning musical performers in Japan and whose single Teacher Teacher sold more than 3m copies in 2018.
Another lengthy post - please view the rest of this article at the Guardian.
Senior Anglican clergyman standing trial charged with child sex offences in Australia
Graeme Lawrence gives evidence to the child abuse royal commission in 2016. (Supplied: Royal Commission)
A court has heard the most senior Australian Anglican clergyman to be charged with child sexual abuse used his power and influence to dissuade his alleged victim from disclosing the abuse.
The former Dean of the Newcastle Anglican Diocese, Graeme Russell Lawrence, is standing trial charged with aggravated sexual assault and aggravated indecent assault.
The alleged offences upon a 15-year-old boy in the New South Wales Hunter Valley date back to 1991.
Mr Lawrence has pleaded not guilty to all the charges and has been on bail since being charged in December 2017.
Up to 28 Crown witnesses are due to give evidence over the coming weeks.
Crown says boy silenced by fear
Graeme Lawrence was a senior figure in the Newcastle Anglican Diocese for decades. (Facebook)
The Crown alleges the boy was taken into a room in the nearby deanery, where Mr Lawrence lived, and where there were pictures of naked boys on the wall.
Crown prosecutor Craig Leggat SC said the boy was nervous when he realised he was only person there.
He said the then Dean removed the boy's t-shirt and forced him to the ground before sexually and indecently assaulting him.
The court heard at the time the boy thought about telling his mother but decided not to.
"The evidence will be that he thought about telling his mum what the accused had done, but he didn't think she would believe him," Mr Leggat said.
The prosecutor said Mr Lawrence also encouraged the boy to keep quiet.
"The accused tried to talk to him afterwards when he was in groups, when he would ignore the accused," Mr Leggat said.
"However there was one occasion when the accused spoke to the boy and said, 'Don't bother telling anyone, you know who I am, no-one will believe you'."
Defence barrister Paul Winch said the accused was in a position to be presumed innocent.
"It is not for Mr Lawrence to prove anything, it is for the Crown to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt.
"In addition to his pleas of not guilty, Mr Lawrence's position is that there was no sexual conduct at all.
"On no occasion did he invite the boy to the deanery and they were never alone together at any time."
Police act on royal commission referral
Strike Force Arinya was formed several years ago to investigate allegations of sexual assault in the Newcastle's Anglican Diocese.
New South Wales Police received a referral, alleging abuse at the hands of Mr Lawrence, from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in 2016.
Mr Lawrence studied at the St Johns Theological College at Morpeth in the 1960s and was the Anglican Dean of Newcastle from 1984 until 2008.
The royal commission heard he was highly revered and was once in line to be the city's next bishop.
The Anglican Church Survivor Support Service can be contacted on 1800 774 945 or 4907 5730.
Aberporth, Wales man with child sex abuse images
told to expect jail
AN Aberporth man has been warned today, June 14, to expect a jail sentence after he admitted making and distributing child sex abuse images.
Roberts, of Brynglas, admitted distributing indecent images of children, 21 in the most serious category A and three in category B.
Roberts also admitted making indecent images, 74 in category A, 37 in B and 34 in C.
All the offending took place between July 22 and December 21, 2017.
Judge Thomas warned Roberts the offences were serious and undoubtedly warranted a substantial sentence.
He agreed to delay sentencing until July 12 to allow time for a probation officer to prepare a report into Roberts' background. Judge Thomas granted him bail until then.
No comments:
Post a Comment