Interpol says U.S. police has detained suspected pedophile

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The suspected pedophile. Photo: EFE

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A suspected pedophile targeted in an international manhunt was detained Thursday by police in the United States, Interpol announced.

Interpol said the suspect was detained just after midnight Thursday in Union City, New Jersey. It identified him as Wayne Nelson Corliss, 58, an actor who also goes by the stage name of Casey Wane.

The arrest was made two days after Interpol, the international police agency based in Lyon, France, appealed for public help to track down the man. The agency's head, Ronald Noble, said the appeal had proved an "extraordinary success" and that such calls for public help could in future be expanded from child sex offenders to "seriously wanted international criminals". Interpol said images of the man allegedly abusing children had circulated on the Internet.

He was detained after Interpol's appeal drew nearly 250,000 visits in just 24 hours to the agency's Web site, where photos of the man were posted, and several strong leads e-mailed in by people who recognized him, Noble said. "Live by the sword, die by the sword", the Interpol secretary-general said in an Associated Press telephone interview. Without the Internet, the suspect "wouldn't have been able to circulate his sexual abuse on the Internet. But if it hadn't been for the Internet, we wouldn't have been able to catch this guy". Noble added that because of the success of such appeals, "I'm convinced that other people who have filmed themselves abusing children will begin to think about turning themselves in".

Interpol said the man is suspected of sexually abusing at least three young boys from Southeast Asia. It said that photos seized by police in Norway in 2006 showed the man's alleged abuse. Interpol said the boys were thought to have been as young as 6 to 10 years old.

The agency had appealed for public help because two years of police investigations had failed to determine the man's identity, nationality and whereabouts. Interpol said it feared that the man's alleged abuse of children could continue if he was not caught. Without the appeal, "this guy would still be out there", said Noble.

The photos that showed the alleged abuse dated to 2000 and 2001, but Noble said the agency believes that the man had also traveled to Southeast Asia more recently than that.

It was only the second time that Interpol had launched such a public manhunt for a suspected pedophile. The first time, last October, also rapidly led to an arrest, by police in Thailand, of a 32-year-old teacher from Canada, Christopher Paul Neil. In that case, Neil's face had originally been disguised in Internet photos with a digital swirl. Police reversed the swirl process, unmasking his face, and Interpol released those cleaned-up images publicly. Neil went on trial in March, accused of sexually abusing a 9-year-old boy. The suspect in the latest case did not appear to make any effort to hide his identity in the photos that were seized in Norway on the computer hard drive of a man later convicted of child sex offenses, Interpol officials said.

Interpol on Tuesday had released six photos of the suspect publicly as part of its appeal for help. They showed a gray-haired white man wearing glasses or lying on a checkered mattress or blanket in a yellow plaid shirt.

Other photos seen by The Associated Press, not among those made public, appeared to show the man engaged in sexual acts with boys. Because of the lack of basic information about the man, Interpol officials had previously been simply calling the suspect "Mr. IDent", shortened from the word identity.

Interpol officials said they did not know why the man did not attempt to disguise his face in photos that showed alleged abuse. But officials noted that pedophile offenders sometimes reveal their identities to win trust in child-sex offender circles, in hopes of getting access to other children or images.

A computerized Interpol database of child abuse images played a part in the hunt for the man. The first photos seized in Norway and others received in the two years since were run through the database of more than 520,000 images. It compared the photos with others, looking for matches.

In all, the database and police investigations helped turn up a total of around 800 images, including nearly 100 of the man himself and others of his suspected victims or places where he is thought to have committed his alleged crimes, Interpol said.