Let’s not forget, Goa had a Freddy Peats

In 1991 Freddy Peats, a man entrusted with taking care of young children, in his charity home in Colva, turned out to be a horrific violator, whose sordid deeds made him languish in Aguada Jail serving for nine years before he died of a stroke in GMC in 2005.

The notorious paedophile, arrested on April 3 1991, charge-sheeted in 1992, was convicted on March 21 1996. 

His partner in crime Eoghan Colm McBride was also sentenced to seven-year rigorous imprisonment in July 2002, along with Peats, for a running child prostitution racket in the southern coastal belt here.

The Margao police, in 1991, had busted his decade-long paedophilic racket he was running in the name of Gurukul, an orphanage.

Dominique Sabir from France was also arrested in 1996 but due to police negligence, he managed to jump 

bail in July 2002. He is still absconding.

The child sex abuser also sold children to other paedophiles from abroad. Had it not been for a boy complaining to his father that the man injected something in his posterior; he would have exploited many more children. The father complained to the police and a raid at Peats’ residence in April 1991 unearthed a horrific, international sex racket that had been running for over two decades. Police found 2,305 porn photographs of minor boys engaged in sexual acts with elderly white men, 135 strips of negative films, syringes and narcotics. The injection that he gave to boys was for the purpose of inflating the testicles for sexual activities. An activist in Mumbai Sheila Barse’s sustained campaign resulted in his conviction, as there were allegations that the police here were not that serious to slap strong case against him. 

While, there is absolutely no evidence to even suggest that anything close to this was taking place at Light House, it does not absolve this charity from scrutiny, especially since one of its married staff members had an affair with a minor inmate and got her pregnant.

Light House too is run by foreigners, who are now absconding and it was a bustling shelter home until its abrupt closure in April 2014, like the Gurukul Orphanage started by the Anglo-German paedophile at Colva. Except for the statutory rape involving an inmate and the staff, there has not been any other incident reported.