« Home | A very hollow death. » | Not much intelligence from the Intelligence and Se... » | More on the al-Qaida in Britain hoax. » | Getting to the bottom of the beheading plot. » | Express-watch: Soft touch journalists. » | Our shared dictators. » | Migrants send our crime rates plummeting! (And can... » | Aitken report: the rusty sword and shield of Briti... » | Scum-watch: Living in a parallel universe. » | Is anyone thinking anything at all? » 

Thursday, January 31, 2008 

The heirs of Fagan, that, err, weren't.

They were ‘twenty-first century Artful Dodgers’, we were told, a gang of ‘Fagin’s children’ from Romania, who had been trafficked to Slough, England, in order to work like slaves in a ‘pickpocketing and begging crimewave’. The Metropolitan Police launched dawn raids on various ‘slavery dens’ in Slough last Friday; some of the police reportedly wore balaclavas and riot gear and were closely followed by film crews invited along to witness the moment the ‘child slaves’ were liberated. Footage of officers carrying kids from terraced houses was beamed across the news bulletins, as various newspapers declared: ‘Romanian child slaves freed in Slough.’ A Met officer said his team was committed to ‘dismantling crime networks’ and to the ‘rescue of [trafficked] children’ (1).

There was only one problem with this story: it was as fictional as the original Dickensian tale of artful dodgers. The Roma children were not child slaves; of the 10 kids ‘rescued’ in Slough on Friday (one of whom was less than a year old: hardly pickpocketing material), all but one were reunited with their natural parents or guardians the following day (2). No evidence has been discovered to show that the Roma adults in Slough were involved in a ‘criminal gang’ or a ‘child slave ring’ or any other form of serious criminality. Of the 24 adults arrested, 14 have been charged: nine with immigration offences, three with the theft of mobile phones, and two with handling stolen mobile phones… hardly the kind of crimes that require a heavy-handed, camera-flashing raid at five in the morning.


Who honestly would have thought it?

Labels: , , , ,

Share |

1/31/2008 09:45:00 pm | |

Post a Comment

About

  • This is septicisle
profile

Links

    Elsewhere

    Junk

    blogspot stats
    Subscribe

     Subscribe in a reader

Previous posts

Archives

Email me
Syndicate this site (XML)
Powered by Blogger
and Blogger Templates