Canadian serial sex offender jailed for abusing orphan
KATHMANDU: A 71-year-old Canadian convicted and later cleared of more than a dozen sex offence charges in his home country has now been jailed in Nepal for sexually abusing a 15-year-old disabled orphan, officials said on Monday.
Ernest Macintosh, a businessman from Nova Scotia, Canada, has been sentenced for seven years in prison by a Nepalese court for repeated sexual assaults against the boy whom he met at an orphanage in Kathmandu last year.
“Posing as a social worker, Macintosh befriended the boy who lost his right arm to a burn injury in his childhood. He promised the boy a prosthetic arm, bought him clothes, took him to restaurants and then to his hotel room where he engaged in unnatural sex with the boy several times,” Police Inspector Radha Prasad Parajuli, who investigated the case, said.
Macintosh, who moved to Nepal in August, was arrested in December following the boy’s complaint.
The Lalitpur District Court that handed him the prison sentence also ordered him to pay US$10,000 (about 323,000 baht) in compensation to the boy, said Deputy Superintendent of Police Pawan Giri, police spokesman for the district that neighbours Kathmandu.
Canadian media reports say Macintosh had a decades-long history of sexual offences. He was convicted of sexual assault and indecent assault in the 1980s. After he moved to India in 1994, 40 additional sexual offence charges surfaced. It took Canadian authorities until 2007 to extradite him, after which he stood trial and was convicted of 17 sex offences. But his appeal to those convictions was successful on grounds that it took too long to bring him to trial.