Canadian Authorities Fumbled Extradition While Executive Stayed at Large in India
By Matt McClure
The Star [India]
June 3, 2007
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/220940
New Delhi–For nearly 11 years, a Canadian charged with sexually abusing young boys was free to prey on children overseas while Canadian authorities dragged their feet on his extradition from India.
Now, after being banned from two Indian schools, and more than three decades after allegedly committing his first offences in Canada, the accused pedophile may finally be on the verge of extradition from India.
But Ernest Fenwick MacIntosh's case raises serious questions about Canada's commitment to pursuing fugitives who hide on foreign soil, wreaking havoc with the lives of possible victims. Officials with the federal justice department and the Nova Scotia prosecution service blame one another for the decade-long delay, but can provide no clear explanation for why this case fell through the cracks.
Indeed, the federal Passport Office renewed MacIntosh's Canadian passport in 2002, at the very time Canadian police and justice officials were considering how to have him extradited. Without a passport, MacIntosh would have been compelled to leave India.
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| Police escort alleged pedophile Fenwick Macintosh from his home in the New Delhi suburb of Gurgaon on May 18 of this year. "I don't understand why he was able to get a new passport, or why we weren't asked to arrest him sooner," says New Delhi Police Insp. Awanish Dvivedi. |
"I don't understand why he was able to get a new passport, or why we weren't asked to arrest him sooner," says New Delhi Police Insp. Awanish Dvivedi.
"It appears to me the whole system in Canada was asleep."
RCMP first charged MacIntosh in 1995 after one Nova Scotia man alleged he was abused as a young boy. But it wasn't until last year that Canadian authorities asked India to arrest the 63-year-old bachelor and send him back to face trial.
During that time, MacIntosh lived in New Delhi's best neighbourhoods and travelled overseas as a high-flying manager for major electronics companies.
While he lived in India and on several prior visits, MacIntosh befriended dozens of young boys he met through churches, schools and casual encounters on the street.
Two former students of Gandhi Ashram, – a school in northeastern India run by a Canadian priest – now say MacIntosh took them to area hotels where he fondled them or coerced them into performing oral sex. An outwardly devout Roman Catholic, MacIntosh was one of many foreign visitors who came to Darjeeling during the mid 1980s to witness firsthand Father Ed McGuire's fledgling effort to feed and educate the area's poorest children.
| I am in Delhi and missing you... Don't you forget I love you. Messages allegedly sent to teenage boys in India. |
One of the students says he was just 11 when MacIntosh first invited him to stay at his hotel as a "special treat." Now 31, he recounts waking that night to find MacIntosh touching and putting his mouth on his private parts. There were subsequent stays, he says, when MacIntosh showered with him and coaxed him to provide oral sex.
"He would take me to his room, molest me and the next morning we would go to mass," he says.
"It seems crazy to me now, but back then it was normal because I didn't know any better."
The alleged offences in Canada date back to the 1970s, when MacIntosh ran his own electronics company in Port Hawkesbury, Nova Scotia.
After MacIntosh was charged, police tracked him down in India and phoned in August 1996 to see if he'd come back to Canada to face trial. MacIntosh refused, so the RCMP asked the federal government to revoke his passport in the hope that Indian authorities would then deport him.
Under federal regulations, a passport can be revoked or refused to anyone wanted on an indictable offence. But when Canadian authorities tried to take away his passport in September 1997, MacIntosh fought the move in Federal Court. The judge was not impressed by the government's evidence and ordered another hearing. Before that happened, federal lawyers abandoned the case.
MacIntosh kept his Canadian passport, obtained another in 2002 and continued to travel frequently on business and pleasure to Britain, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sri Lanka. By 1998, police and government lawyers in Nova Scotia realized they needed a new strategy to get MacIntosh back to Canada.
| MacIntosh chronology 1970-77 While living and working in his native Nova Scotia, MacIntosh is alleged to have molested 9 young boys in Halifax, the Port Hawkesbury area and Cape Breton Island. Complaints from the alleged victims do not surface until much later. 1985 A former student at Gandhi Ashram school in northeast India alleges he was fondled MacIntosh during an overnight stay at his nearby hotel. 1992 MacIntosh is living in Montreal, but obtains an Indian driving licence during a visit to Darjeeling. 1994 MacIntosh moves to New Delhi and opens a sales office for a California-based telecommunications company. 1995 After a Nova Scotia man complains he was molested in the 1970s as a young boy, RCMP charge MacIntosh with indecent assault and gross indecency. 1997 Authorities try to revoke Macintosh's Canadian passport to force him to return and face trial. The effort fails after MacIntosh contests the issue in Federal Court. 1998 In August, Nova Scotia asks the federal Justice Department to extradite MacIntosh back to face trial. 1999 In India, MacIntosh is banished from Gandhi Ashram school after allegations he fondled another student he invited to stay at his hotel room. 2001 RCMP in Nova Scotia lay an additional 41 charges against MacIntosh after eight other men complain they were sexually abused as young boys. 2002 MacIntosh obtains a new Canadian passport in May, despite regulations that allow authorities to refuse a travel document to anyone wanted for an indictable offence. 2006 Canada asks Indian authorities to arrest MacIntosh and extradite him back to Canada. The July request comes 10 and a half years after MacIntosh was first charged. 2007 Police say they found photos of young boys in his apartment and suggestive messages on MacIntosh's cellphone when he was arrested in April. |
A spokesperson for Nova Scotia's prosecution service says in August that year a formal extradition request was sent to Justice Canada. But Chris Hansen says lawyers with the federal department asked lots of questions before they would agree to proceed.
As the RCMP dug for answers, she says they found eight more boys who alleged MacIntosh had sexually abused them.
"There was a lot of back and forth," Hansen says. "It took a little while."
By December 2001 – some two and half years after Nova Scotia requested
MacIntosh's extradition – the charges were finalized and warrants were issued. There were now 43 counts of indecent assault or gross indecency stretching over a seven-year period and involving young males from Halifax and several small communities in eastern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton.
Then, for reasons that neither Nova Scotia nor the federal government will explain, there was a further delay of five and a half years before an extradition request was sent to Indian authorities last July.
"The process is the responsibility of the federal government," Hansen says. "We can request, but it's their decision about when to act."
But Tom Beveridge, who oversees extraditions at Justice Canada, suggests incompetence by lawyers and police back in Nova Scotia is the reason the case took so long to complete.
"We get sent stuff all the time that's not good enough and we have to send it back till it's done right," Beveridge says.
While the wheels of justice ground slowly in Canada, MacIntosh was still working deals with India's business elite by day and spending evenings with schoolboys. Abinash Bindra rented MacIntosh the ground floor of his family's New Delhi home for two years in the mid 1990s, before suggesting the Canadian should move elsewhere.
"There were always young boys coming over for ice cream and meals." Bindra says. "We'd see him caressing these kids the way a parent might. It made us very uncomfortable."
Despite his generous donations to Gandhi Ashram, former staff members say MacIntosh was banished from the school in 1999, after allegations he assaulted a student he'd taken on an overnight trek in the nearby mountains.
Balam Garung, the school's administrator at the time, says a dozen boys went on the trip, but a 13-year-old returned a day later than the others after spending the night at MacIntosh's hotel. A few weeks later, Garung says, the youth told him MacIntosh had fondled him.
Contacted by phone, the accuser – now 20 years old and studying at a college in Darjeeling – again says MacIntosh sexually molested him. Indrajit Singh, the school's science teacher at the time, recalls the angry confrontation that followed the alleged incident.
"MacIntosh was swearing and denying he'd done anything wrong," Singh says. "Father McGuire was telling him to go and never come back."
While MacIntosh was no longer welcome at Gandhi Ashram, he remained a regular visitor to another area school, Dr. Graham's Homes. The school says MacIntosh paid $5,000 to fund one boy's fees and donated another $2,500 for repairs to a dormitory.
In his May 2001 report, the principal wrote that MacIntosh also "gave some of our boys a holiday."
But Michael Robertson, chair of the board at Dr. Graham's Homes, says MacIntosh was banned from the campus in 2004 after staff learned of the allegations he faced in Canada.
When MacIntosh tried to attend a church service at the school last year, Robertson says security officers escorted him off the premises.
"He came bearing the credentials of an international businessman and we trusted him. We find it sad that he was allowed to openly travel the world for so many years while these charges were pending."
A legal scholar at the University of British Columbia says the apparent foot-dragging in MacIntosh's case could prompt a judge in Canada to dismiss the charges.
"It's usually only one or two years from when charges are laid and the file is sent to a foreign government," says Garry Botting. "The victims have a right to speedy justice, but so does the accused."
Since his arrest, MacIntosh has been denied bail, although he's allowed out of New Delhi's infamous Tihar Jail during business hours under guard to wrap up his affairs.
Through his lawyer, MacIntosh refused a request for an interview. Harvinder Singh Phoolka says his client is not contesting his extradition and thinks an Indian judge may order him returned to Canada after his next court appearance in early June. If MacIntosh is indeed extradited, he will leave behind many unanswered questions. Police in New Delhi wonder about the photos of young boys they found in his apartment. In several, the youths are sitting on his lap. In one, they say, a boy is lying asleep on a bed. Text messages they say were stored on his cellphone show MacIntosh's involvement with unsuspecting youths continued right up until the eve of his arrest.
"Don't you forget I love you," he writes to a 14-year-old boy.
"I am in Delhi and missing you," reads a message sent to a 15-year-old he met on the street and invited back to his hotel room.
To another youth, he types three suggestive messages in the space of 11 minutes: "For banana, I will come to get you. For banana, I am free any time."
"If you find it and it is remembering me and ready, tell me and I will come."
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