Posted on 04/29/2004 6:24:36 PM PDT by aculeus
AGEING British rocker Gary Glitter has slipped back into Phnom Penh and is living in an opulent riverfront mansion despite being at the top of Cambodia's blacklist of suspected pedophiles.
Glitter has set up residence in the well-to-do suburb of Takmao and is surrounded by scouts and minders who are believed to have been paid to keep strangers away from his three-storey traditional Cambodian-style home. Cambodian authorities have been unable to stop him getting back into the country after he was deported in late 2002.
The Women's Affairs Minister, Mu Sochua, said she knew he had returned to Cambodia but she had been unable to stop him.
She said Glitter was at the top of a blacklist of people who were not welcome in Cambodia and she intended to take the issue of enforcing the blacklist to the Cambodian Prime Minister, Hun Seng.
"I am continuing to push this case," she said. "I get reports that he is in Sihanoukville with a bunch of children ... and that he is in Cambodia and he intends to stay here."
When The Australian fronted up at his lush hideaway overlooking the Prek Ho River, Glitter's landlord, Sok Sam Bath, said the former star was away.
Mr Sok said Glitter was a good man who paid him well and always paid his rent on time. "He doesn't do anything bad here.
"He just wants a quiet life and he doesn't want to talk to people like you."
Neighbours who know Glitter as Ta (grandfather or old man) said he kept to himself and they rarely saw him. They said that children used to go to play in the large grassed grounds surrounding the house that backs onto the river, but that had recently stopped.
Glitter, whose real name is Paul Francis Gadd, was jailed in 1999 in Britain after he was found with a computer library of thousands of hardcore child pornography pictures involving children between the ages of two and 10. After being released from jail, he travelled around the world for more than a year before arriving in Cambodia.
At first he stayed in a cheap guesthouse in Phnom Penh, according to locals, before he moved to a more expensive townhouse down by the riverfront.
Despite police saying that Glitter has a "no entry" to Cambodia stamp in his passport, he managed to get back into the country and he has also launched an appeal against his deportation.
The 60-year-old claimed in the legal action that he had been wrongly deported because he had never committed a crime in Cambodia.
Brigadier-General Un Sokunthea, the head of the Anti-Human Trafficking and Juvenile Protection Agency said her team of officers were on the lookout for him.
"We have sent him out of the country once already," she told The Australian.
© The Australian
Shoot it.
FMCDH
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