Former RUC chief exposes child sex tourism on US TV

Jim Gamble

Monday, 15 November 2010
Belfast Telegraph (Ireland)

The former head of Special Branch in Belfast and the host of US TV show America's Most Wanted posed as paedophiles to investigate the sex trafficking of Cambodian youngsters.

Jim Gamble, ex-chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), and John Walsh said they were shocked when they went into a Cambodian bar where there were 50 to 60 girls.

“Within two minutes a madam came up to us and said ‘What are you looking for?' and Jim said, ‘We're looking for young girls'. She brought over three or four girls that were (about) 12 or 13 years old — very, very young,” said Mr Walsh.

Mr Gamble told her they wanted younger girls, Mr Walsh said.

He said the woman replied: “What do you want? We have six and seven-year-old boys and girls. I can arrange that off-premises.”

Mr Walsh said the experience was “disgusting and heartbreaking.”

He said Western paedophiles from the US, Britain and Germany travelled east to Cambodia as international sex tourists. He said his show chose Cambodia because it was cheap to buy a sex slave there.

“I saw many Western men that had gone there, not to go to the Buddhist temples, not to go to look at beaches, not to do anything at all but to molest and have sex with children. It's wrong, it's illegal and it has to change,” Mr Walsh said.

He said the episode would be a “tough show to watch” but it was important to expose the reality that children were sexually assaulted by predators — many of whom were from the US.

So far the show has captured 1,135 criminals in its 24 seasons.

America's Most Wanted is shown on primetime on Saturday nights in the US on Fox.

Senior police officer Mr Gamble, the former head of Northern Ireland's anti-terror unit, resigned from Ceop in October over the government's decision to make it part of the National Crime Agency.