CANADA
Calgary Herald
BY BOB WEBER, THE CANADIAN PRESS NOVEMBER 17, 2013
IQALUIT, Nunavut – The worst is already over, says one of the dozens of alleged victims of a disgraced priest whose trial on 76 sex-related charges involving Inuit children is to begin Monday.
“It’s almost a relief,” the woman said recently from her home in Igloolik, Nunavut, the community where most of the charges against Eric Dejaeger from 18 years ago are based.
Dejaeger was supposed to be tried in 1995 for his activities as an Oblate priest in the tiny Arctic hamlet on the Melville Peninsula. Instead, he fled to his homeland of Belgium — some say with the tacit consent of Canadian justice officials.
It was as if he’d returned from the dead when he was brought back in January 2011 after Belgium kicked him out for immigration violations, the woman said.
“We were told that he was never going to be found. And when he came back to life and came to Canada, that was a shock to all of us.”
That shock rocked Igloolik’s 1,500 residents.
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