PICTURE this: police raid a series of addresses based on credible information that child sexual abuse was ongoing at ‘parties’ held at those premises in which rich and powerful men sexually abused boys as young as seven. During the investigation, which span­ned several months, police identified one of the culprits as a prominent parliamentarian, obtaining video evidence among other things.

But as they are building their case, and a damning one at that, the officers are approached by members of intelligence agencies and told to hand over all evidences, case notes, videos etc and to back off from the politician in question.

They are told that any attempt to pursue this case would result in the policemen themselves being charged with offences akin to treason. The evidence, after all, also implicated a high-ranking member of the intelligence community. In fact, the list of abusers reads like a who’s who of top government echelons.

If you’re thinking this is a plot for a movie or TV series, you’re wrong. If you think these events took place in Pakistan, where the powerful routinely prey on the weak, you’re wrong. This occurred in the 1980s in the United Kingdom. The parliamentarian in question is the now-deceased Liberal MP Cyril Smith, and the intelligence agency is none other than the much-vaunted MI5.

The story gets more sordid the deeper you dig. In the 1980s an MP named Geoffery Dickens compiled a dossier containing enough evidence to blow the lid off what seemed to him was an elite group of sexual sadists operating at the highest levels of British government, carrying out their crimes with utter impunity for decades.

Details are emerging of a VIP child abuse ring in ’80s Britain.

In the weeks after he handed over the dossier to the authorities, his son claims their house was “professionally burgled” several times. No action was ever taken on the dossier and the British Home Office now claims it was lost. It also admits that 114 other “potentially relevant” files have been lost or destroyed.

At the centre of this massive scandal is the Elm guest house, a London boarding house that operated as a homosexual brothel but was in fact a meeting place for powerful pedophiles.

Among its frequent visitors, other than the aforementioned Smith, were Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbarn, as well as diplomat and intelligence operative Peter Hayman. Also linked is Lord John Henniker-Mayor, former British ambassador to Jordan. Henniker also frequently played host to Peter Righton who ran a pressure group aiming to legalise sex with children.

Among the children systematically abused at the Elm house was ‘Nick’, now in his forties. According to him, at least three children were murdered in connection with what went on there. One boy was ‘deliberately run over’ while another was ‘strangled to death’ by a Tory MP. Another was killed when one man’s sadism went too far. The rest of his statement is too graphic to reproduce here.

Incidentally, the lady who ran the Elm house, and who routinely boasted to her friends about her high-profile clientele, was found dead with an empty syringe of insulin. Her death was ruled a suicide.

Consider that all these men were connected to the elite of the British establishment. These were men in constant contact with prime ministers and royalty, and to assume background checks did not uncover their sordid proclivities insults the intelligence. To believe that such crucial evidence files simply went missing due to bad record-keeping is also impossible. What is, however, possible and even likely is that their crimes were covered up by an establishment eager to protect its own under the all-encompassing bann­ers of political expediency and national security.

In some cases, there wasn’t even a political connection to consider. Take Jimmy Savile for example. A popular TV personality in the 1970s, details about his victims — hundreds of them over a decades-long career of abuse — only began to emerge after his death in 2002. Victims came forth earlier, yes, but every time they were hushed, intimidated or simply not believed.

Particularly noxious is the fact that he even allegedly raped seriously ill children at the Stoke-Mandeville hospital, for which he was a prominent fundraiser. When one child spoke out, she was told to remain silent because if she got Jimmy in trouble the hospital may have to close its paraplegic centre. Thus, despite the fact that staff knew about his crimes, they helped cover them up. And yes, Savile was also a close friend of ministers, prime ministers and the British Royal family.

For decades these crimes have been hidden, and it is only recently that sections of British media have reported this story, that too in large part due to a relentless campaign by online activists named ‘operation: death eaters’. The details reported here in this column are a tiny part of the massive store of information out there, and that information is just the tip of the iceberg. What we know is stomach-churning, what we may yet learn and what we may never know must be truly monstrous.

The writer is a member of staff.

Twitter: @zarrarkhuhro

Published in Dawn, April 6th, 2015

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