News

Ja sex perverts held in US

TWO JAMAICANS ARE among several persons who were imprisoned in the United States recently after they were convicted of sexual offences.

The two Jamaicans were arrested in Philadelphia for sexual offences as part of an Immigration Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Operation Predator programme. Operation Predator is a nation-wide ICE initiative to protect children from sexual predators. Persons who travel to the United States and engage in sex with minors, child sex trafficking and Internet child pornography are targeted by the programme.

One of the Jamaicans was deported from the United States last month after serving four years for the charges of rape and statutory sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl in Philadelphia in 1996.

The man, Rohan David Williams, 33 years old, was deported to Jamaica last month after he was held at a detention facility in York County, Pennsylvania prior to removal.

According to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement(ICE) Pennsylvania office, Williams was convicted in 2001 of rape, statutory and sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl in Philadelphia in 1996. The office said they could not disclose the details of when he was held or who informed the police, but said his trial had taken place in 2001. He was found guilty of the offences and sentenced to four years imprisonment.

Williams was among a group of four men who were deported from the United States last month after being convicted of sexual offences. The other three men are Mexican immigrants, Gregorio Romero-Rios, 52, who was convicted of forcibly committing sodomy with a 12-year-old boy in New York in 2000; Jorge Ramirez, 36, a maintenance worker in New York City, who was convicted in New York in 2002 of sexual conduct against a child, and Juan Lara-Guadarrama, 25, who was charged with indecent exposure after he was videotaped at a department store in New Castle, Delaware, because he was following young girls in the store as he masturbated on November 24, 2004.

Williams is the second Jamaican to be nabbed under the Operation Predator programme. In April 2002, another Jamaican was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for raping his eight-month-old daughter. The man reportedly caused so much internal damage to the baby that she was forced to undergo reconstructive surgery.