Excavations were started into four blocked-up cellars referred to as “punishment rooms” by alleged victims. Blood spots in a concrete bath and shackles were found in one cellar.
Bones in Jersey abuse probe ‘from at least five children’
Prosecution “unlikely”
LONDON (AFP) — Police said Thursday they had found the remains of at least five children at a former home on the Channel island of Jersey, but admitted a murder inquiry was increasingly unlikely.
Deputy Chief Officer Lenny Harper, who is leading the investigation, said the remains could not be dated exactly.
A search at the Haut de la Garenne site, which closed in the 1980s and became a youth hostel, has found 65 milk teeth and more than 100 bone fragments, including one from a child’s leg and another from inside an ear.
Police say an attempt was made to burn the remains to conceal them.
Harper told BBC radio: “We were pinning our hopes on the process of carbon dating. The latest information we’re getting is that for the period we’re looking at, it’s not going to be possible to give us an exact time of death.”
He added: “The indications are that if the results come back the same way as they have now it is obvious there won’t be a homicide inquiry.
“We cannot get away from the fact that we have found the remains of at least five children there.” He said the children were aged between four and 11.
“But at the end of the day there just might not be the evidence to mount a homicide inquiry in an attempt to bring anybody to justice.”
Jersey, which lies off the coast of northwest France, is a British dependency which has its own political and legal system and an independent police force.
A former member of the island’s governing council who was removed from his post last year said the intervention of police from the British mainland was now the “only hope” for victims of the abuse to see justice done.
Stuart Syvret, a former health minister, has alleged that the island’s authorities covered up the abuse.
“Knowing Jersey, even before I was aware of the covert police inquiry into abuse I said to a number of the survivors that we had no chance whatsoever of winning this war unless we could get it exposed outside Jersey,” he said.
“The only hope for justice is if London intervenes and it sends a completely independent judiciary, prosecution and courts, without any prior connection with Jersey.”
However, the investigating officer Harper is not from Jersey, and neither is the police officer who will replace him in the coming weeks when he retires.
Syvret claims mistreatment occurred in Jersey children’s homes until as recently as 18 months ago when the issue was highlighted by a social worker.
Three men have so far been charged with child abuse offences as part of the inquiry.
Police began searching at Haut de la Garenne in February after the discovery of what was at first thought to be a skull fragment. It was part of a wider abuse investigation on the island.
Excavations were started into four blocked-up cellars referred to as “punishment rooms” by alleged victims. Blood spots in a concrete bath and shackles were found in one cellar.
In one cellar, the disturbing message “I’ve been bad for years and years” was found scrawled on a wooden post.
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