UNITED KINGDOM
Mail On Sunday
Enoch Powell is named by bishop in sex abuse probe: Scotland Yard to investigate satanic abuse claim – and demands to see filed held on serving MPs
By Giles Owen and Brendan Carlin for The Mail on Sunday
The probe into an alleged paedophile network at the heart of the British Establishment took an explosive turn last night with the revelation that Enoch Powell’s name has been passed to police.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the late Tory MP, one of the most prominent and divisive politicians of the 20th Century, has been named to Scotland Yard by the Bishop of Durham. The claims relate to ‘ritual satanic abuse’.
And in a further development to the sex-ring investigations, police are to be given access to secret files held on MPs in the House of Commons archives as they hunt for evidence on suspected abusers, including former Liberal MP Cyril Smith.
The Bishop of Durham, Paul Butler, contacted police after Powell’s name was passed to him by a former Bishop of Monmouth, Dominic Walker, who first heard the allegation when he was a vicar counselling young adults in the 1980s.
The claim is being examined by Operation Fenbridge, one of a number of police probes into ‘Establishment paedophile rings’ – including an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission into claims that officers dropped their inquiries under pressure from powerful individuals.
Mr Walker is believed to have warned the Right Rev Butler that at the time he was told of the claims against Powell, unsubstantiated allegations of satanic rituals – often involving the abuse of children – were widespread.
In 1994, an investigation by the London School of Economics into 84 alleged cases of ‘satanic abuse’ in the UK between 1987 and 1992, including notorious cases in Rochdale and the Orkneys that involved social workers and police forcibly removing children from their homes in dawn raids, found no convincing corroborative evidence.
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