CANADA
The Province
By Staff Reporter, The Province
January 18, 2012
The B.C. attorney general’s office has named Peter Wilson as special prosecutor to pick up its explosive investigation into the polygamist community of Bountiful.
The Vancouver lawyer was appointed this week to replace Richard Peck, who stepped down from the probe early this month.
B.C.’s legal branch is trying to determine whether charges of sexual exploitation or other offences are warranted against members of the commune.
The breakaway Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints sect, in B.C. since the early 1980s, has been accused of forcing underage women into arranged marriages and motherhood with much older men. There have also been accusations of trafficking young women between Bountiful and a like-minded community in the U.S. led by Warren Jeffs. Jeffs is serving a 20-year sentence in a Houston jail for sexual assaults on two girls whom he “married” when they were 12 and 14.
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