This story comes via Britain’s The Daily Mail, not the most reliable of news sources, but it is still shocking and more trustworthy news outlets like The Guardian and the The Telegraph have also covered it.
Police are today investigating whether members of a VIP Westminster paedophile ring murdered three young boys at ‘abuse parties’ as it emerged victims may have been abused at military bases.
Scotland Yard detectives are calling on witnesses to come forward if they know anything about boys being killed at Dolphin Square, a block of flats in Pimlico, London.
It is believed that every weekend in the late seventies and early eighties groups of vulnerable boys were smuggled to an address in the exclusive development by the Thames close to Parliament.
There, after being plied with alcohol, they suffered sickening sexual assaults by the rich and powerful including Tory MPs, and one victim says some children were eventually killed.
The Met has launched Operation Midland to probe the claims and said today accounts of murders by an alleged abuse victim appear to be credible but no names and bodies have ever been found.
Scotland Yard also believe that abuse took place at locations in London and Home Counties between mid-1970s and mid-1980s – but this has now been widened to include military bases.
The man, now 40, has told police he saw a Conservative MP strangle a 12-year-old boy to death at an ‘abuse party’ in 1980.
Apparently a member of parliament Geoffrey Dickens compiled a dossier on the pedophile ring and handed it to a cabinet minister in 1984 but the dossier mysteriously disappeared. Dickens died in 1995. The Telegraph has published a timeline of the events.
The UK has a long history of sex scandals involving politicians and other high officials but this one is more shocking than anything I am aware of, especially what seems like the huge cover-up of such monstrous crimes. Apparently the British government used its great power over the media to suppress the story for some time by threatening newspapers if they published anything about this on the grounds that (you guessed it) might damage national security.
But I am surprised that the US media have not picked up on it. Or maybe it has made TV news here and thus I missed it.
Satanic panic anyone?
Well, Dickens was a well known conspiracy theory lunatic, with his main focus in the later 1980’s being the evil satanic child abusers that had covens all across the UK. This and other people’s complaints led to the famous raids on families which uncovered no abuse whatsoever but did traumatise a lot of families. It has also to be remembered that Dickens was anti-homosexual, and at that time the age of consent for homsexuals was 21, so anyone introducing an 18 year old could be branded an paedophile.
So basically it’s another satanic panic, with no evidence. Dickens claimed to have compiled a number of ‘dossiers’, but as far as I can find out they were just gossip and propaganda. It all feeds into the anti-establishment theories of many people, but it is extremely unlikely that anything actually happened. More recent panics include that children’s home on an island, I think one of the channel ones, claims were raised but nothing at all found out. Of course the newspapers have no idea of the history of Dickens, that would require actually doing some research and recalling their own unsavoury role in previous panics.
There is no benefit to having power, unless you abuse it.
Sounds like an series of Prime Suspect.
guthriestewart@2,
It’s true Dickens was a homophobic conspiracy theorist, but I wouldn’t be sure there’s no basis to these claims. I remember claims being made, before Dickens’ hooey about satanic abuse, that several senior Tory politicians were involved in sexually abusing boys. The current government’s handling of setting up a broad into histroical child sexual abuse does not inspire confidence, and could suggest there are things they would rather were not looked into too closely: both the enquiry chairs they tried to appoint turned out to be connected with senior Tories whose failure to investigate at the time would need to be examined, and had to step down. As for the “children’s home on an island”, you’re remembering Haut de la Garenne on Jersey. It’s true that the most sensational claims, of bodies buried there, have not been substantiated, but more than one person has been convicted of abuse there, Jimmy Savile (wouldn’t you know it?) apparently extended his crimes to the place, and a new enquiry is underway.
This case looks like it’s about to fall apart, in much the same way as the Rud and McMartin Preschool cases fell apart: some credible accusations to start, then a dizzying spiral of ever-more-outrageous allegations, until we’re well outside the realm of believability and the whole prosecution effort loses all credibility.
The former was a case where a guy named Rud in (IIRC) Indiana or Illinois was accused of molesting some boys. More accusations piled on, culminating in a story of a boy being murdered. No name or body was ever found, no missing boy was ever linked to the case, and the whole thing fell apart. Which is rather ominous, since, in both that case and this recent one, there could well be real crimes that could end up being buried for another generation.