Mumbai paedophile suspect held in Tanzania

‘‘This is great news,’’ said Naval Bajaj, Assistant Commissioner of Police in Mumbai (South Zone). ‘‘It will cut short the process of bringing Grant to trial here.’’

Grant (52, according to the Mumbai police, 61 in interviews with this paper), a former sailor, has been wanted by Mumbai police since November 2001 on charges of sexually abusing street boys at three shelters he had set up. He had fled the country when the case was registered.

The Mumbai police had little hope of reaching Grant. They had been following a convoluted legal route, only responding since April to requests from UK authorities for information on Grant for an independent inquiry into fund mismanagement. The The Indian Express reported, beginning last week, how Grant was running three ‘‘shelters’’ for about 400 children in Tanzania since June 2002.

The Indian Express then shared its information with a Tanzanian paper, The Guardian, which turned the spotlight on Grant bringing his antecedents to the notice of the Tanzanian authorities. On August 25, the Mumbai Police Commissioner told this paper that he was helpless: ‘‘Since India does not have an extradition treaty with Tanzania, we cannot push for his arrest.’’

However, the Tanzanian police chief today said that the international warrant would suffice and ‘‘extraditing him to India should not be a problem.’’

‘‘We checked our database, and found that Grant indeed exists high on the list,’’ said Rajabu of the man who has apparently been travelling freely in and out of Tanzania to the UK on biannual fundraising trips due to the obvious failure of the international warrant in place since April 2002. Grant, formerly a sailor in UK’s Royal Navy Reserve, is currently in police custody in Tanzania.

If found guilty, Grant could be handed a jail sentence of upto 10 years. His co-accused, the Briton Allan Waters is to be brought back from Washington shortly by a Mumbai police team—leaving Wednesday morning—following his arrest in New York last July on the basis of the warrant.

While at the moment, there are no charges against Grant of crimes on Tanzanian soil—and he has been arrested with a view to extradite—the police there maintain that Grant’s Tanzanian shelters will be the subject of a formal investigation.

Grant also figures on UK’s National Criminal Intelligence Services (NCIS) paedophile database. (Bilham Kimati is a reporter with The Guardian, a newspaper based in Dar-es-Salam).

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