‘THEY WERE VERY, VERY INNOCENT’
Investigator recounts arrest of pedophile
BAGO, MYANMAR• It’s been nearly a decade, but Akbar Khan hasn’t forgotten the day Thai police sent him to interrogate Christopher Paul Neil.
He remembers the crooked smile that Neil, the B.C. pedophile known internationally as “Swirl Face,” shot him from across the interrogation table all those years ago.
Khan is a Bangkok private investigator, debt collector and translator who works with Thai police as an interpreter and liaison. But “liaison” can mean many things.
He’s sometimes known as “The Chameleon,” he says, for his ability to pass undercover: he can blend in with the cab drivers, meth heads and coked-up wackos who sometimes wander the streets of Bangkok looking to score.
Khan often participates in sting operations for the Thai police. Scammers, thieves, dishonest dope dealers and consumers of child porn have all been subject to his inquisitions — which sometimes leads directly to confessions, many of which Khan films and posts to his YouTube channel, Radio 419 MHz.
One upload to the channel from January 2008 offers a different perspective on a scene that made front pages across Canada: a shaky hand-held camera surveys a crush of media, then pans to a table draped with a white tablecloth and festooned with microphones as Thai police lead Neil, clad in a white T-shirt and sunglasses, his head shaved, into a press conference to expose him to the world.
On Wednesday, a B.C. judge sentenced Neil, 41, to five-and-a-half years in prison after his guilty plea last December to five child-sex charges. But because of time already served, he will spend just over 14 months in prison.
Khan was part of the team that took Neil down, and though not present at his arrest in 2007, he is privy to many details of the investigation. He is speaking out about the case in the hopes Canadians will be reminded of the severity of Neil’s crimes.
The investigator is half Indian and half Irish, 50 years old and tanned, and if you ask him, he’s outspoken about how effective it is in his profession to be a nondescript brown person.
The only substantial indicator of his origin comes from his British accent, incubated during his childhood in Borehamwood, a suburb of London — a city where in early adulthood he eventually became a skip tracer.
Khan says he grew up with a tough Irish mother who taught him not to take any abuse as a kid. But he wasn’t always pulling the punches during his childhood, as you might expect of an up-and-coming debt collector. He says there are many ways to lean on people.
“Everybody has strengths and weaknesses,” Khan says.
In 2007 Khan was working as an operative for the Royal Thai Police’s Department of Prevention and Suppression of Crimes Concerning Women and Children, now known simply as the Anti-Human Trafficking Department.
Footage Khan captured and later posted to YouTube depicts a Thai press conference on Oct. 18, 2007, at the height of the Interpol manhunt for Swirl Face. A highranked Thai policeman, Maj.-Gen. Wimon Powin, describes the crimes of which Neil was accused — including luring children from Internet cafés and into his home where he would pay them 200 baht (about $7) for sex acts.
Later the same day, Powin issued an arrest warrant after Neil’s shaved head was spotted at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport.
Once in custody, Neil wasn’t responding to his Thai interrogators’ questions. As a foreigner with a knack for getting foreign crooks to open up, Khan was sent into the interrogation room to get him to talk.
What he remembers most is the twisted smile playing across Neil’s face when he tried getting him to answer questions.
“If you understand the job, you will know that to get a criminal acting like that — busted for a crime like that — it’s almost unseen,” Khan says. “What every policeman expects to see is remorse, guilt or a feeling of wrongdoing.”
But with Neil, there was none, according to Khan. And for that reason he doesn’t believe Neil’s changed much in nine years.
Even without an immediate confession, the case was a “slam dunk” for the Thais, who imprisoned Neil for five years for his pedophilia and abuse in that country. His sentence would have been longer, but he eventually confessed and it was noted by the judges, who sent him back to Canada for prosecution.
In December he pleaded guilty to half the charges, and at a B.C. Supreme Court hearing in April, Neil apologized to his victims. He told the sentencing judge that he didn’t fully appreciate the impact of his crimes on his victims until hearing about it in court and that it was his “full intention to change (his) life.”
The apology doesn’t move Khan at all. It offers no compensation whatsoever to his underage victims.
“By underage, I don’t mean in the vicinity of 17. I mean in the vicinity of seven,” Khan says.
“They weren’t child prostitutes, and they were very, very innocent.”
Khan scoffs at the notion that Neil can change. “I have seen people give up their life of drug-dealing and go into other businesses, and occasionally I have seen people give up drugs. I cannot say the same for pedophiles,” he says.
“It seems to be something that, once it’s manifested to that great extent, it’s something that stays with them until they die.”
IT’S SOMETHING THAT STAYS WITH THEM UNTIL THEY DIE.