An Australian national accused of sexually abusing children was convicted by a Railway Court in Visakhapatnam but is out after receiving bail.
Paul Henry Dean aka Alan Herbert Rose came to India in 1976 after committing fraud in Australia. According to an NGO worker quoted by the News Minute, Dean fled Australia despite an Interpol notice issued against him. He has also been discussed in the Australian Parliament. The Australian Police informed the Australian Parliament that India did not reply to their requests, the report added.
Dean has lived under different identities in Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, abusing children in both places. The case against him in Andhra Pradesh had been ongoing since 2001.
The case against him in Odisha is also going on. In Visakhapatnam, he was convicted based on the statement of a visually impaired victim.
Dean was found guilty under sections of the Passport Act, Foreigners Act, section 377 (unnatural sex) and 292 (2) (A) (exposing obscenity) of IPC, and was awarded three years imprisonment and a fine of Rs. 32,000. He received bail the same day even though he has a history of being at flight risk.
He had taken the guise of a doctor and performed cataract surgeries and amputations even though he was not qualified for them. He was arrested in 2001 by the Visakhapatnam Police for allegedly committing sexual offenses against children but even then he received bail and fled to Odisha, where he’s accused of committing similar crimes in Muniguda village.
One of the first and youngest victims in Titlagarh, Odisha, going back to the 1980s was a hearing and speech impaired boy called Anil Kumar. The boy had used sign language to raise an alarm that Dean was abusing him but no action was taken. Kumar committed suicide in July 1985 and Dean was forced to leave the area.
He then went to Visakhapatnam and abused the most vulnerable children such as orphans, those belonging to poor families, kids who had visual, hearing or speech disabilities, those afflicted with leprosy, and others. After this, he returned to Odisha in November 2008, where Mary Ellen of the Mary Ellen Gerber Foundation complained to the Puri police that he was abusing boys at the MEG village. This case is still pending.