9. There have also been allegations of child sexual abuse associated with Elm Guest House, a former hotel in Rocks Lane near Barnes Common in south-west London, since the 1980s. This establishment was run by husband and wife Haroon and Carole Kasir, and was advertised as a gay guest house. In June 1982, Elm Guest House was raided by police. It appeared that at least one boy, aged 10, had been sexually abused on the premises. The boy made a statement to police in which he said that he had been raped by adult males at the house. A social worker claimed that the boy made an allegation in relation to an “Uncle Leon” that was not reflected in the boy’s formal typed statement. A masseur who worked on the premises, then aged 17, also claimed that two undercover officers had sex with him in the guest house before the raid, and that he was intimidated by officers not to speak the truth about what he knew.
10. Following the raid, the Kasirs were taken into custody. In April 1983, Carole and Haroon Kasir were convicted of running a disorderly house. They were each sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment suspended for two years and fined £1,000. None of the guests at the house was convicted of any offence and no politician or VIP was ever identified as having been involved.
11. In June 1990, Carole Kasir was found dead. At the inquest into her death, which was ruled a suicide, Mr Chris Fay (an employee of the National Association of Young People in Care (NAYPIC)) alleged that he had spoken to Carole Kasir with his colleague, Mary Moss. The so-called ‘Mary Moss List’ of VIP guests to Elm Guest House was produced during these interviews and later published online. Mr Fay alleged that Kasir informed him that boys were trafficked from Grafton Close Children’s Home and abused by VIPs in the guest house.[1]
12. Mr Fay repeated these allegations years later, in a 2015 BBC Panorama programme entitled ‘The VIP Paedophile Ring: What’s the Truth?’, in the wake of the public concern about child sexual abuse associated with Westminster.[2]
13. Geoffrey Prime was a former intelligence officer and Soviet spy. He worked for the Royal Air Force and later for Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) during the 1960s and 1970s. Prime had made a set of 2,287 index cards containing details of individual girls, their activities and their parents’ routines. In 1982, he pleaded guilty to three counts of sexual offences against children as well as espionage offences. He was sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment for the espionage offences with three years’ imprisonment to run consecutively for the sex offences. In November 1982, Geoffrey Dickens MP asked Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher about Prime’s membership of PIE. Mrs Thatcher responded that she understood that such stories were false.[3]
14. Geoffrey Dickens was a campaigning MP. In March 1981, he used parliamentary privilege to ask the Attorney General if he would prosecute Sir Peter Hayman for sending and receiving pornographic material through the Royal Mail, and whether there would be an investigation of the security implications of the entries in Hayman’s diaries referred to in Tom O’Carroll’s trial at the Old Bailey. In 1983 and 1984, Mr Dickens had a series of meetings with the then Home Secretary Leon Brittan, at which he provided information purporting to identify other high-profile child sexual abusers in government and the Royal Household.
15. The information he provided has come to be known as the ‘Dickens dossier’ but what exactly was in the ‘Dickens dossier’ and how many dossiers there were is unclear. The evidence suggests there may have been several files or documents which have individually and misleadingly become known as the ‘Dickens dossier’.
16. Claims that a copy of the dossier was seized under threat of imprisonment from journalist Don Hale in 1983 added to the intrigue. Mr Hale was the editor of the Bury Messenger and said he had been given substantial parts of the ‘Dickens dossier’ by Barbara Castle MEP, who had herself received it from Mr Dickens. Mr Hale alleges that Special Branch officers burst into his office and demanded that he hand over the material he had received from Barbara Castle, whereupon he was handed what purported to be a ‘D-Notice’ preventing publication of any material contained within the seized documentation.