KATHMANDU, MAR 02 - The Lalitpur District Court on Sunday convicted Canadian national Ernest Fenwick MacIntosh, 71, on the charges of paedophilia. A single bench of Judge Tek Narayan Kunwar slapped a seven-year jail term and ordered the convict to a pay Rs1 million in compensation.MacIntosh was arrested on December 13 on the charge of sexual assault of a boy residing in a social centre in Lalitpur. Police in January had filed the case against him in the trial court on the charges of “unnatural” sex.
Meanwhile, an Agence France-Presse report adds MacIntosh, who arrived in Nepal on a tourist visa last August, approached the Jesuit-run St Xavier’s Social Service Centre for homeless children with an offer of donations.The case underscores problems facing Nepal’s orphanages, some of which have been hit by allegations of sexual abuse, corruption and fraud in recent years.
Although it is illegal to volunteer in Nepal on a tourist visa, orphanage officials often allow foreigners to spend time with children in exchange for donations. Background checks are rarely conducted on those offering to help. In August 2012, Briton Simon Jasper McCarty pleaded guilty to sexually abusing three boys whom he met in Nepal. In December 2010, French charity worker Jean-Jacques Haye was convicted of raping 10 children in a Kathmandu orphanage.
MacIntosh had sexually assaulted the boy, who has only one arm, offering him gifts and promising medial support to have a prosthetic arm. The convict has a history of sexual assault against children. In 1970s, MacIntosh was booked on the charge of sexually assaulting four boys in Canada. In 2011 several of the charges were overturned by a court in Canada stating that his case took too long to get to trial. As of 2009, there were 46 cases of sexual assault among which 36 had been taken to court and there were 13 convictions. MacIntish was extradited from India to Canada in 2007 under similar charges. The District Court on Sunday also directed the authorities to try such cases under “trafficking” rather than “unnatural sex”.
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