Posted on 12/04/2002 12:09:02 PM PST by Land_of_Lincoln_John
PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - British glam rock star Gary Glitter, convicted of child pornography offences in Britain in 1999, has returned to Cambodia, officials said on Wednesday, putting the government in a quandary about what to do with him.
Glitter -- whose real name is Paul Francis Gadd -- turned up a week ago in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh where he has been staying as a tourist at an unidentified guest house.
"He has been in town since last week," an interior ministry spokesman told Reuters. "We are trying to locate him. If we find him, we will need a decision from interior ministers about what to do next."
The 1970s pop icon caused a storm of controversy in May when he was found setting up home in Cambodia, whose notoriously lax judicial system and weak law enforcement have created its reputation as a safe haven for child sex offenders.
Although he committed no crimes in Cambodia, the impoverished Southeast Asian nation's minister for woman's affairs, Mu Sochua, led a campaign to kick Glitter out on the grounds his presence sullied the country's image.
He left Cambodia at the end of May, and was widely believed to have gone to Vietnam, although this was never confirmed.
Glitter was sentenced in 1999 to four months in a British prison for downloading child pornography from the Internet.
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