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CRIME:
PAEDOPHILIA
Deviant
Devils
The arrest
of a Swiss couple blows the lid off a cybersmut racket. But officials
feel they still have a long way to go.
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KINKS:
The Martys lured children with gifts and forced them to have sex
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Room
No. 108 at The Resort, a five-star hotel in Mumbai's north-western suburb
of Malad, offers a breathtaking view of the golden Aksa beach and the
Arabian Sea. But the view that greeted the six-member police team as they
forced their way into the room was, if anything, disturbing. Standing
stark naked were the occupants of the room, a Swiss couple, Wilhelm Marty,
59, and his 56-year-old wife Loshiar. With them were two wide-eyed girls,
aged nine and seven, also naked. As the police swarmed in, the nervous
couple hurriedly wrapped towels around themselves. "We love Indian
children," protested Wilhelm, a professional management consultant
from Steinhausen in Switzerland. "We come to India to take care of
them."
The police,
of course, did not buy the story. They searched the room and found, apart
from the usual clothes, a bag stuffed with children's dresses and cheap
Chinese goods-dolls, watches, teddy bears, shoes and radios-enough to
keep a busload of children happy.
Even as
Wilhelm smiled and tried to appear normal, his eyes constantly darted
towards the sleek laptop kept on the dresser. When the policemen inspected
it, he made a desperate lunge. Grabbing the laptop he tried to smash it
on the floor before he was overpowered by the policemen. The laptop was
switched on. What it revealed sent shivers down the spines of even the
hardened Mumbai policemen. Sordid images of hardcore child pornography
flashed on the monitor. There were pictures of Indian, Thai and Caucasian
children engaged in sex with adults. Some of the pictures had the couple
in graphic sexual acts with little girls, including the duo in the room.
The images had been meticulously stored and dated back to several years.
The police couldn't have asked for more clinching evidence.
Their passports
showed that the Martys had been regular visitors to India over the past
10 years. Their modus operandi remained the same: check into posh hotels
and then take taxi tours of south Mumbai. For foreign tourists, Churchgate,
Colaba and Malabar Hill can be unpleasant places, doggedly pursued as
they are by beggars and street children. But for the Martys, these were
happy hunting grounds. They carried their bags of gifts along, luring
dozens of street children, almost on a daily basis. The children were
taken to their room where they would be bathed and cleaned, almost ritually,
before the slaughter of their innocence began. The acts were captured
on a digital camera and downloaded on the laptop.
Ironically,
the gifts that the Martys lavished upon the street children, especially
the girls, proved to be their undoing. The boys told social workers from
the Forum Against Child Sexual Exploitation that girls were being given
better gifts by the couple. The forum tipped off the Mumbai Police's social
welfare branch which raided the hotel.
Surprisingly,
the hotel staff took no notice of the dozens of street children who flocked
in with the couple on their visits each year. The two little girls rescued
from the Martys' clutches were examined by a police surgeon. The girls
told him that the couple had asked them to do "ganda ganda kaam (obscene
acts)". The nine-year-old had also been picked up and abused by the
Martys last year.
The case
is the first of its kind in the country since it involves the use of the
Internet. With cyberspace turning into a virtual haven for paedophiles,
there's a constant demand for child pornographic material. The Mumbai
Police feel that the Martys could be one of the many thousands of global
sources that feed this depraved urge. The full extent of the racket is
still being probed. Senior Inspector Shirish Inamdar says about one lakh
children in Mumbai are vulnerable to deviants.
In charging
the Martys for kidnapping and sexual molestation the police may have scored
India's first triumph against cybersmut. But there is still a long haul
ahead.
-Sandeep Unnithan
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