LONDON // Gary Glitter, the disgraced former pop star, was deported from Vietnam yesterday after serving a prison sentence for child sex offences. Last night, the "glam rocker" flew back to the United Kingdom, an airline official confirmed, despite earlier concerns that he might disappear while changing planes en route.
Jacqui Smith, the UK's Home Secretary responsible for courts and the criminal justice system, pledged that Glitter would not be allowed out of the country once he returns. "We need to control him, and he will be, once he returns to this country," she said in a radio interview. "It certainly would be my view that, with the sort of record that he's got, he shouldn't be travelling anywhere in the world.
"I want Gary Glitter to be controlled whilst he's here, and I don't want him to be able to go anywhere else in the world in order to abuse children." Glitter, 64, whose real name is Paul Gadd, served all but three months of a three-year sentence imposed after he was found guilty of molesting two Vietnamese girls, aged 10 and 11. This year, Glitter had said that once released he planned to settle in either Singapore or Hong Kong and would try to revive his pop career.
However, in an interview last week, he said he wanted to return to Britain to receive free medical treatment on the National Health Service for the heart and hearing problems he suffers. Last night, Scotland Yard officers were awaiting his return at Heathrow airport in the UK, where he will join 30,000 other names on Britain's Sex Offenders' Register. He will be required to inform police of his movements, where he is living and any plans he has to leave the country again.
"We are expecting him back on Wednesday morning," a police source said. "He will be met by officers at Heathrow. In the absence of his arranging acceptable accommodation for himself, he will initially be taken to a hostel in the West Country." Glitter, who had 26 hit singles on the UK pop music charts between 1972 and 1995, was driven 120 kilometres from Thu Duc prison to Ho Chi Minh City airport after his release yesterday morning.
Although he had a one-way ticket to London, there are no direct flights between Tan Son Nhat airport and Heathrow. Glitter transited n Bangkok, according to airline officials quoted by Agence France-Presse. Le Thanh Kinh, his lawyer, said Glitter wanted to return to the United Kingdom, but added that there was nothing to stop him going anywhere once he had left Vietnam, as long as he could get a visa.
"He has served his sentence, and the authorities in Vietnam will deport him," said the lawyer. "He does not have any sentence to serve in London. If he wants to stop wherever he wants to, he can do that. "If he wants to, he can change flights. He is a free man. The only problem is the countries he wants to go to because he has to get a visa. He is looking forward to coming back. He is thinking about being free, but worried about reporters. He is OK, but he is worried about his health."
Glitter, who has sold more than 20 million records worldwide and was once famous for his flamboyant bouffant wigs and winged silver jumpsuits, was arrested in Vietnam in Nov 2005, and charged with committing obscene acts with the two girls in Vung Tau, a resort-cum-oil-town. He denied the charges but was convicted in March 2006, and received a three-year sentence, the minimum. It was not the first time that Glitter's paedophilia had landed him in trouble with the law. In 1999, he was jailed for four months in Britain after taking his computer to a repair shop where, by accident, engineers found that the hard drive was full of child pornography.
At his trial, the judge described the 4,000 images on the computer as "the very, very worst possible type" of child pornography. After his release from prison, Glitter moved to Cuba and then to Cambodia, from where he was expelled in 2002 after it was reported he had been trawling for child sex. He later moved to Vung Tau in Vietnam, where three prostitutes he had met in Phnom Penh helped him procure children for sexual acts, according to prosecutors at his trial.
A UK citizen living in Vung Tau had originally alerted a British newspaper to Glitter's activities. They tracked down the former pop star, and he was arrested as he tried to fly from Ho Chi Minh City to Thailand. Glitter later paid US$2,000 (Dh7,340) to the family of each child he had abused, thus evading the more serious charge of child rape, which carries the maximum sentence in Vietnam of death by firing squad.
The judge at his trial, which was not open to the public, described Glitter as "sick" and "abnormal". The singer himself denied all the charges, claiming that he was just teaching them English. He said that they had stayed overnight in his apartment because they were scared of ghosts. Attempts are expected to be made when Glitter returns to the United Kingdom to have him served with a foreign travel ban, although such orders have proved notoriously difficult to impose in the past.
Ecpat UK, a child protection charity, said court orders to stop sex offenders from travelling overseas had only been successfully imposed on three Britons in six years, compared with more than 3,000 similar bans on football hooligans. Diana Sutton, of the UK's National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, said everything possible must be done to stop Glitter travelling abroad again. "Gary Glitter is a persistent offender, responsible for a catalogue of sexual crimes against children," she said.
"So-called 'sex tourists' move around the world and target countries they know have weak or non-existent child protection systems. "We know about Glitter because of his fame, but there are many other sex offenders, not in the public eye, who are falling off the radar." @Email:dsapsted@thenational.ae