The MAN at the helm of the Jersey child care investigation was involved in the fight against the IRA, a former Royal Ulster Constaulary colleague revealed tonight.
Lenny Harper, was a detective based in the republican heartland of Andersonstown at the peak of the violence in Northern Ireland.
Former constabulary colleague Brian McVicker said tonight: “He was a first-class operator, a fantastic worker. He was a go-getter because he was a policeman who caught people.”
His son-in-law, a commanding officer with the Royal Military Police, was shot dead in Basra in August 2003.
Harper comes from the Waterside area of Londonderry but served just eight months as a sergeant in west Belfast on secondment from the London Metropolitan at a time when tensions heightened dramatically because of a developing crisis inside the Maze Prison in advance of the first of two republican hunger strikes which were to claim the lives of 10 men.
Forensic experts continued their search today at the former care home amid fears they had found six graves.
Teams at Haut de la Garenne in St Martin, on the east coast of the island of Jersey, are working with sniffer dogs and specialist equipment - including ground penetrating radar - to fully excavate parts of a youth hostel.
Deputy Chief Officer Harper said the search was "concentrated on the entrance to the cellar."
Police today expanded their cordon around the grounds and put up what appear to be two more investigation tents.
The work is being led by two sniffer dogs - one which specialises in detecting human remains and another which specialises in detecting blood.
Officer Harper said they had given "positive indications."
The major search is being conducted as it is feared children’s bodies could be hidden in the GROUNDS, under the FLOOR or in CELLARS since filled with concrete.
Cops revealed they have identified 140 surviving victims of sexual and physical abuse dating from the 1950s until earlier this decade.
Asked about the dead, Officer Harper said bluntly: “There could be six or more. It could be higher than that.”
Meanwhile a politician who tried to expose the scale of the horror on Jersey’s east coast claimed authorities had covered it up for generations in case it wrecked the holiday island’s image.
The nightmare centres on a mansion featured as a police station in the TV cop series Bergerac and currently a £14.95-a-night youth hostel.
Scandal
It was run as Haut de la Garenne home for children in care but has also housed underage criminals and kids with special needs.
It now seems it was the base for a paedophile ring for more than 50 years.
And police suspect the scandal stretches beyond the site in St Martin to care homes across the island.
Their investigation was triggered two years ago when a string of paedophile probes led to the home.
Officers kept the operation covert for 12 months to avoid alerting suspects.
They went public a year ago – and were bombarded with calls from victims living as far away as Thailand and Australia.
Three of them – now grown-up – told officers children had vanished and that they believed remains were buried at the site.
A sniffer dog used in the hunt for Madeleine McCann was called in.
The cocker spaniel, called Eddie, identified a spot beneath a corridor. Just inches beneath the concrete were found a teenager’s SKULL, a hair clasp, a scrap of fabric and a button.
Forensic tests to determine the victim’s sex, age and identity have begun.
The dog has so far gone on to pinpoint six other “hot spots” inside and out.
Ground-penetrating radar confirmed the sites as suspected graves. It will takes weeks to excavate them all.
“We have two archeologists and a team of forensic people fingertip sifting through a number of trenches.”
It emerged ANOTHER body may have been unearthed five years ago. But bones found on the ground were assumed to belong to an animal.
Detectives are now trying to locate them for forensic tests.
Referring to the horrors committed on the site, Mr Harper added: “We are talking about offences ranging from assaults through to rape and beyond.
“Back in the 1950s when children reported crimes like this against people who were respected figures, adults tended to treat them differently than they would today.
“It was a different age with different attitudes. There is now a huge groundswell of relief from victims that they are finally being listened to.”
Ex-Health Minister Senator Stuart Syvret told how he was SACKED after being shouted down for trying to raise the abuse scandal in the island’s parliament last year.
He said: “I fear we are at the tip of the iceberg. If it had been written as a script for Bergerac it would have been torn up as too extreme.
“I was trying to get my own department to face up to it but it was clear that I was being obstructed.
“There has been long-running, systematic failure of child protection.
“There has never been any official acknowledgement of all the decades of abuse. It has all been concealed from the public. We have been trying to make this island realise that it is has messed up catastrophically.”
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article841043.ece
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