Indian prosecutor drops case against Varun Gandhi after anti-Muslim speeches

Feroze Varun Gandhi, an estranged member of India's famous Nehru-Gandhi family, was jailed in the months before India's 2009 national election for making anti-Muslim speeches.

At one political rally, Gandhi told a throng of onlookers, “These people have scary names like Kareemullah and Mazaharulla. You will be scared if you run into them in the night. But if anyone raises a finger against Hindus or if someone thinks Hindus are weak, I swear on the Gita that I will cut that hand.”

Gandhi purportedly compared one of his political rivals to Osama bin Laden. Later confronted with the video tape, he denied making the comments. "That is not my voice. Those are not my words," Gandhi at the time told Times Now, a news channel in New Delhi.

Yet his comments stoked furious debate in India, which trumpets its standing as the world's largest democracy yet also has a history of religious-based violence. The magazine India Today called Gandhi a "messiah of hate."

After a 20-day detainment and two criminal charges of making hate speech, Gandhi was released on bail and won a seat in India's parliament. His victory came even though election officials found the video evidence of Gandhi's venomous comments to be authentic.

Four years on, India is again on the hot seat after a new, damning report by investigative magazine Tehelka claims that Gandhi, now 33, has been exonerated of all charges.

Of the 88 witnesses who were scheduled to testify against Gandhi, all have recanted.

"This is probably unprecedented in the history of a criminal case," Tehelka writes.

The magazine charges that witnesses were threatened and bribed by the police; testimonies were taken without a judge in court; crucial witnesses, including the forensic expert, were not summoned by the public prosecutor; many were not even questioned.

Tehelka reporters Rahul Kotiyal and Atul Chaurasia say they have many witnesses admitting all of this on camera.

Gandhi's comments received intense scrutiny largely because he is a great-grandson of India’s founding prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, although Varun Gandhi has been estranged from India’s Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty for the majority of his life.

While his cousin Rahul Gandhi is seen by some as a future prime minister of India for the Congress Party, Varun Gandhi is the most visible young politician for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, which has a vocal and influential Hindu nationalist following.

Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state and the base of the Gandhi family's power, said Tuesday it would challenge Varun Gandhi's acquittal.

If there is good news to be found in the Gandhi scandal, it is that India's national media continues to come of age.

In 1990, India had just a single television channel. But today, there are hundreds of all-news cable channels and a flourishing newspaper and magazine industry, which thrives on reporting stories on government corruption and self-dealing.

Rick Westhead is a foreign affairs writer at the Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead

Pearson child porn arrests highlight need for better child sex tourism investigations

Two travellers returning from Asia have been arrested by Canadian border agents at Toronto's Pearson airport for alleged possesion of child pornography material -- the latest in a continuing series of seizures that highlight the need for better investigations in child sex tourism and the current flaws in Canada’s border controls.

The Canada Border Services Agency said in statement  on Monday that on Feb. 25, a traveller arriving on a flight from Taiwan was found to be "in possession of several USB keys, memory cards and an external hard drive containing hundreds of gigabytes of suspected child exploitation.”

In another incident on March 1, the CBSA says inspectors looking at the laptop and other electronic devices belonging to a traveller arriving from China “discovered encrypted files of explicit sexual material involving children.”

Both men were arrested for smuggling and charged by Peel Regional Police for possession of child pornography, according to the CBSA.

 What is interesting is that in both cases, the discovery of the alleged illegal material happened during what is called “secondary inspection” – when either as a result of a random check or suspicions by a border agent, a traveller is pulled from the usual passport check for further inquiries.

As the Star pointed out in a recent series on child sex tourism, the so-called “primary” border agents on the front-line who scan the passports of all people who enter the country do not have direct access to the police databases or the National Sex Offender registry that might alert to them to people with previous convictions for crimes against children.

What that means is that when Canadians are charged with child sex tourism  -- and that has happened only a handful of times since the law came into force in 1997 -- the alleged crimes are discovered almost by accident.

That’s what happened in the case revealed by the Star of James McTurk, the 78-year-old North York man who had twice been convicted of child pornography cases and had made more than 30 trips to Cuba since 2009 before being arrested by police when he dropped off some pictures to be developed at a local Loblaws.

He now faces nine charges for child sex tourism that include sexual touching of minors with his hands, mouth and penis. No evidence against McTurk has been heard in court, and the charges against him are unproven.

Paul Robb, the detective from the Toronto Police Child Exploitation Unit who carried out the investigation against McTurk, told us that he wondered how many travelling sex offenders are being missed because of loopholes in the law.

“Maybe we should start looking at the travel history for everyone we arrest for possession of child pornography,” Robb said.

The CBSA says that since the beginning of this year, its officers in the GTA region have made eight seizures of goods containing child exploitation images.

How many people accidentally caught with child pornography  might also be engaging in child sex tourism?

One indication of the nexus between child abuse images and travelling sex offenders came to light in the arrest last month of an 82-year-old man from Quebec charged with the alleged sexual exploitation of children in the Dominican Republic.

Canada Border Services Agency officers in a random check decided to look at the computer of Joseph-Charles-Philippe Cote last October as he was returning from a Caribbean holiday.  They found disturbing pictures of young children, according to a Canadian Press story that cited a subsequent search warrant by the Surete de Quebec.

It was enough for the provincial police to launch an investigation and –- once they discovered Cote had since returned to his favourite beach destination in the Domincan Republic -- they issued an arrest warrant for him and secured an Interpol Red Notice.

In late February, Cote -- who had no previous criminal record -- was arrested in the Dominican Republic and flown back to appear in a Montreal court.

Now he faces not just seven counts of child pornography, but also accusations of hands-on offences for sexually interfering with minors.

 

Julian Sher is a foreign affairs and investigative reporter with the Star and the author of two books on child exploitation. He can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @juliansher.

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Cuba uncovered: Robert Cribb on covering Cuban child sex tourism

HAVANA, Cuba—It was a gut-check moment.

In the middle of interviewing a controversial Cuban journalist in a tree-lined Havana park last month with a photographer/translator from Miami’s El Nuevo Herald, a police car pulled up a few metres away.

In retrospect, it wasn’t the ideal location for meeting with Ivan Garcia, a vocal critic of the Cuban government, to discuss the incendiary political issue of child sex tourism.

But a park bench is where we ended up, the photographer’s small video camera poised inconspicuously on his lap, shooting upwards to capture Garcia’s responses to questions I was posing about Canadian sex tourists and their involvement with young Cuban girls.

We knew in advance Garcia was a risky interview subject.

He is followed by police from time to time ­— surveillance he believes is triggered by his blog posts and reports for newspapers in Florida and Europe.

Among those stories have been accounts of Cuba’s child prostitution market — candid assessments of what the 45-year-old father believes to be a troubling sex trade targeting the country’s most vulnerable.

It’s not the kind of journalism that endears Garcia to a Cuban regime that ranks 171^st out of 179 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ 2013 World Press Freedom Index.

As two police officers emerged from the car, we stared at each other, cameras and notepads quickly tucked away.

For the endless seconds that passed next, I recalled the warnings and the news stories I’d read before landing in Cuba about the country’s arrested and imprisoned journalists.

Then, I watched as the two officers looked our way, paused and went into a nearby home.

“They’re not here for us,” Garcia said. “Relax.”

Easier to say than do.

My photographer colleague and I spent a week in Cuba mostly sleepless, wondering what knocks might come at our hotel room doors in the middle of the night and what explanations we might offer should they seize the material in our hidden cameras and laptops.

“Deny everything,” he advised. “We are tourists.”

How we explain why tourists are recording interviews about Cuban child sex tourism with a dissident journalist and an equally outspoken independent lawyer was never clear to me.

On the way out of the country, I couldn’t find the small visa card I was given upon entry. The Air Canada desk directed me to a corner of the airport to speak with Cuban authorities.

Clumsily explaining the problem I was told to wait. A half hour passed. Heads from inside a small office occasionally ducked out to look at me. A surge of anxiety rose as my flight departure time got closer.

“You’re free to go,” a border official finally told me in Spanish, handing me the required paperwork.

On the flight home to Toronto I watched the film Argo with a deep emotional appreciation for the climax scene in which the plane carrying the undercover American diplomats lifts off the tarmac with Iranian police in hot pursuit.

I love that movie.

Read the Star’s Child Sex Tourism series here.

Robert Cribb is a foreign affairs and investigative reporter at the Toronto Star. Follow him on Twitter: @thecribby.