Jersey Police: "Interviews with high-profile abuse suspects are imminent"

Thursday 04 June 2015

Interviews with some of the 13 high-profile suspects identified in an investigation into historic child abuse are due to take place “imminently”, according to the Detective leading ‘Operation Whistle’.

Detective Superintendent Stewart Gull says the suspects – who come from Jersey and the UK – include well-known people from politics, the media, entertainment and the business worlds.

He said: “They are not all local people, they’re a cross-section.

“Some will have visited the Island, some will have been resident here, and some will have lived here in the past.

“We have not made any arrests and we have not interviewed anyone, but we are very close to interviewing alleged perpetrators.

“Some are in Jersey and some are in the UK, there may be some further afield.”

It was announced yesterday that Operation Whistle had been launched on the back of a massive UK investigation sparked by the surge in abuse victims coming forward after the death of prolific child abuser Jimmy Savile.

A dedicated team of six detectives is being launched under the leadership of Det Supt Gull - the detective who caught Suffolk Strangler Steve Wright, who is serving life for the murders of five women in 2006 – and are looking at allegations made by more than 50 people about 45 suspects, including 13 of “public prominence”.

Some of the alleged abusers are dead, and the allegations date back as far as the 1930s but most are from the 1970s and 1980s.

The team are also reviewing abuse allegations relating to four “institutions”, one of which Det Supt Gull confirmed was the former children’s home at Haut de la Garenne, the centre of serious abuse allegations and an international media storm in 2008.

But he said that the cases represented a cultural change in abuse victims being prepared to come forward, not a failure in terms of closing the previous historic abuse inquiry too early.

“What we are seeing is a sea change,” said Det Supt Gull.

“A number of complainants have come forward as a direct result of the Independent Jersey Care Inquiry, which of course is a good thing. Victims are finding a greater trust and confidence to come forward, put their hands up and say ‘what happened to me was not right and I want you to do something about it’.

“Operation Rectangle [the previous historic abuse inquiry] was more or less done and dusted by the time that I came here in 2011. It came to a natural conclusion, and there was a closing report and a small number of prosecutions and a number that were assessed but not considered to have met the threshold test.”