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Paris: A suspected paedophile targeted in an international manhunt was detained yesterday by police in the United States, Interpol announced.
Officials said the suspect was detained just after midnight yesterday in Union City, New Jersey. He was identified as Wayne Nelson Corliss, 58, an actor who also goes by the stage name of Casey Wane.
The arrest was made two days after Interpol, the international police agency based in Lyon, France, appealed for public help to track down the man.
The agency's head, Ronald Noble, said the appeal had proved an "extraordinary success" and that such calls for public help could in future be expanded from child sex offenders to "seriously wanted international criminals."
Interpol said images of the man allegedly abusing children had circulated on the Internet. He was detained after Interpol's appeal drew nearly 250,000 visits in just 24 hours to the agency's Web site, where photos of the man were posted, and several strong leads emailed in by people who recognised him, Noble said.
"Live by the sword, die by the sword," the Interpol secretary-general said. Without the Internet, the suspect "wouldn't have been able to circulate his sexual abuse. But if it hadn't been for the Internet, we wouldn't have been able to catch this guy."
Noble added that because of the success of such appeals, "I'm convinced that other people who have filmed themselves abusing children will begin to think about turning themselves in."
Interpol said the man is suspected of sexually abusing at least three young boys from Southeast Asia. It said that photos seized by police in Norway in 2006 showed the man's alleged abuse. Interpol said the boys were thought to have been as young as six to ten years old.
The agency had appealed for public help because two years of police investigations had failed to determine the man's identity, nationality and whereabouts. Interpol said it feared that the man's alleged abuse of children could continue if he was not caught.
Without the appeal, "this guy would still be out there," said Noble.
The photos that showed the alleged abuse dated to 2000 and 2001, but Noble believes that the man had travelled to Southeast Asia more recently than that.
It was the second time that Interpol had launched such a public manhunt for a suspected pedophile. The first time, last October, also rapidly led to an arrest of a 32-year-old teacher from Canada, Christopher Paul Neil, in Thailand.
Digital swirl
In that case, Neil's face had been disguised in Internet photos with a digital swirl. Police reversed the swirl process, unmasking his face, and Interpol released those cleaned-up images publicly.
The suspect in the latest case did not appear to make any effort to hide his identity in the photos that were seized in Norway on the computer hard drive of a man later convicted of child sex offences.
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