An Australian man who posed as a doctor and priest to rape children at the Indian orphanages where he volunteered has been released immediately after being convicted.
Paul Henry Dean, 75, was found guilty last month of “unnatural sex” with young boys and men at an orphanage for children with visual, speech and hearing impairments.
The charges were first laid in Andhra Pradesh state in 2001, after which Dean moved to another state, Odisha, where he was accused of sexually abusing more boys. Those charges are understood to still be pending.
Dean, who has lived in India for more than four decades after fleeing Australia on a fake passport in 1976, was sentenced on 21 February to three years’ prison and a 12,000-rupee (£132) fine.
But he was released the same day by the same court after filing an appeal, according to S Naidu, the inspector of police in Visakhapatnam, the Andhra Pradesh city where Dean committed the offences.
Proceedings in the Andhra Pradesh high court could take years to be heard in India’s overburdened legal system.
Naidu said police were concerned the convicted paedophile was free in the community. “It is not at all safe for the general public, especially children, if he is out,” he said. “[Dean] is good at fooling people.”
Dean vanished from Australia using a fake passport after allegedly stealing AU$100,000 from a travel company, according to a 2009 investigation by ABC’s Four Corners.
Unbeknown to authorities, the man from Bunbury in Western Australia was reportedly living in India and posing as a Catholic missionary, claiming to have been a professor of agriculture in Australia.
He feigned being a priest and learned surgery from local doctors, eventually performing amputations and cataract surgeries in leper colonies across south India.
But police allege that from at least the early 1980s he was regularly abusing some of the young boys and men in the communities in which he worked.
“Tata [grandfather] tells me to put oil on his penis and hand-pump him,” one alleged teenage victim told Indian police in 2008, according to a statement obtained by Four Corners.
“He also undresses me and masturbates me. This has been going on since 2005. He threatened to beat me up if I told.”
One alleged victim, a 15-year-old with hearing and speech impairments, committed suicide in 1985 after accusing Dean of sexual abuse.
Some of the charities Dean worked with were funded by Australian and other international donors.
Vidya Reddy, whose organisation Tulir works to prevent child abuse in India, said poor coordination between Indian jurisdictions meant police or courts were rarely aware of the history of the offenders they were assessing for bail.
“Except for a few people who have been following Paul Dean since 2001, very few people will have connected the dots [on] him,” she said. “They will be looking at his cases in isolation.”
She said Dean had once jumped from a train to escape police custody and presented an obvious flight risk.
Dean was one of a number of foreigners who had been accused of sex offences in India and fled or benefited from mistakes by those prosecuting them.
“India is now considered the new honeypot for travelling child sex offenders,” she said.
A survey last year of 45,000 children aged between 12 and 18 found half had experienced some form of child sex abuse, virtually all of it committed by someone known to them.
A 2007 study by India’s ministry for child welfare, based on 12,500 children, found a similarly high rate, with more than 53% said to have experienced sexual violence.
Dean reportedly has no passport nor an Indian visa. Indians on Twitter have appealed to the country’s external affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj, to deport him to Australia.
The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed that Dean was receiving consular assistance. They said it generally included “liaison with local authorities regarding the Australian’s well-being, provision of lists of local lawyers and assistance communicating with family members”.