BAGO, Myanmar — It’s been nearly a decade, but Akbar Khan hasn’t forgotten the day Thai police sent him to interrogate Christopher Paul Neil.
He remembers the crooked smile that Neil, the B.C. pedophile known internationally as “Swirl Face,” shot him from across the interrogation table all those years ago.
Khan is a Bangkok private investigator, debt collector and translator who works with Thai police as an interpreter and liaison. But “liaison” can mean many things.
He’s sometimes known as “The Chameleon,” he says, for his ability to pass undercover: he can blend in with the cab drivers, meth heads and coked-up wackos who sometimes wander the streets of Bangkok looking to score.
Khan often participates in sting operations for the Thai police, who pay for his ability to infiltrate, for example, drug circles run by foreigners whose hands come up clean when uniformed Thais show up.
Scammers, thieves, dishonest dope dealers and consumers of child porn have all been subject to his inquisitions — which sometime lead directly to confessions, many of which Khan films and posts to his YouTube channel, Radio 419 Mhz.
One upload to the channel from January 2008 offers a different perspective on a scene that made front pages across Canada: a shaky handheld camera surveys a crush of media, then pans to a table draped with a white tablecloth and festooned with microphones as Thai police lead Neil, clad in a white T-shirt and sunglasses, his head shaved, into a press conference to expose him to the world.
On Wednesday, a B.C. judge sentenced Neil, 41, to five-and-a-half years in prison after his guilty plea last December to five child-sex charges. But because of time already served, he will serve just over 14 months. (more...)
Investigator of notorious ‘Swirl Face’ pedophile gives a behind-the-scenes look at Canadian’s crimes
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