The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Seventeen Hours by Air’

Posted on | April 4, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘Seventeen Hours by Air’

 

In 2013, authorities in West Virginia served a search warrant on the residence of Kevin Burrows and discovered “thousands of child pornography images,” but the suspect could not be found. Burrows, then 62, “abandoned his employment and family after learning a warrant had been issued for his arrest” and officials said he might “have returned to Australia, where he was born.” It took years to find Burrows:

A 68-year-old Australian man wanted in Berkeley County, W.Va., since 2013 on child pornography charges was returned to the U.S. last week and is to be arraigned in federal court in Martinsburg on Thursday.
Kevin Burrows became a U.S. citizen and resided in Hedgesville, W.Va., before fleeing. He was returned from Australia by the U.S. Marshals Service Mountain State Fugitive Task Force and booked at the jail on March 29, according to the U.S. Marshals Service and jail records.
The Australian attorney general ordered his surrender to the U.S. on March 4, according to the U.S. Marshals task force. . . .
The Merimbula News reported that Burrows, of Millingandi, Australia, consented to extradition in a Feb. 23, 2018, appearance in Batemans Bay Local Court in New South Wales.
The newspaper said Burrows had been in custody since his arrest under a provisional warrant on Nov. 6, 2017, at a retirement village in the Far South Coast community, more than 350 miles from Melbourne.
Melbourne is more than 10,000 miles from Martinsburg.
J.C. Raffety, U.S. marshal for the Northern District of West Virginia, said Tuesday that Australia, “to date, is the farthest point from which the Northern District of West Virginia has ever returned a prisoner.”
“Seventeen hours by air,” Raffety said of the flight that deputy marshals took to reach the continent in the south Pacific Ocean.

Pursuing a child-pornography suspect more than 10,000 miles away serves to demonstrate how serious officials are about such crimes. In a press release, U.S. Attorney Bill Powell said that Burrows “now knows the arm of justice, extended by the extraordinary professionals at the U.S. Marshals Service, is more than ten thousand miles long.”

Why is it that suspects like Burrows always seem to have thousands of illegal images of children? Where do these images come from, and how do the suspects obtain them? You can read the story of how federal officials busted Roger Loughry in 2008 as part of an online bulletin board (BBS) called “The Cache” and get a clue. Much of the child pornography exchanged on that network was produced in Ukraine where, from the late 1990s until 2004, a Kiev-based modeling agency served as a front for an operation that victimized more than 1,500 girls ages 8 to 16. That Ukrainian operation was shut down under pressure from U.S. federal authorities during the Bush administration, and it has not escaped my notice that some people — including people with suspicious connections to Ukraine — have seemed to harbor a fanatical animus against Republicans ever since. But maybe that’s just a coincidence . . .



 

Category: Crime

Comments

Comments are closed.