Ninety flights. Fifteen of them after a conviction for soliciting sex from a minor. And according to former prime minister Gordon Brown, British authorities had almost no idea any of it was happening.
Brown has laid out a damning account of how Jeffrey Epstein exploited Stansted Airport as a transit point for trafficking young women from Eastern Europe, moving them through private terminals where visa checks did not apply, and passenger logs were barely kept. Writing inThe New Statesman, the former PM said the recently released US Department of Justice files showed in 'graphic detail' how Epstein 'flew in girls from Latvia, Lithuania and Russia' through the Essex airport. Epstein apparently boasted that Stansted's charges were cheaper than Paris.
Seven police forces across England are now involved in the response,the BBC reported.
The flight logs buried in over three million pages of DOJ documents paint a grim picture.Epstein's Boeing 727, the aircraft widely known as the 'Lolita Express', made 90 flights to or from UK airports. Fifteen of those took place after his 2008 conviction in Florida for soliciting prostitution from a minor. The fact that a registered sex offender could continue flying in and out of British airspace without triggering any alarm is difficult to square with the UK's border security apparatus.
Brown pointed out that Stansted functioned as a transfer hub. Women were moved between Epstein's planes there, and because private aircraft passengers entering Britain did not require visas, the system had a blind spot wide enough to drive a trafficking operation through. BBC investigations have since uncovered flight logs listing unnamed passengers only as 'female',as ITV News reported.
'In short, British authorities had little or no idea who was being trafficked through our country, and for whom other than Epstein,' Brown wrote.
One email in the files is particularly stark. Headed 'the girl', it described a young woman as 'just turned 18, 179cm, very cute, speaks English.' Brown said that the message linked at least one woman toAndrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
Brown's intervention forced a rapid institutional response. Essex Police, the Metropolitan Police, Thames Valley, Surrey, Norfolk, Bedfordshire, and Wiltshire are all now assessing allegations or conducting active investigations,according to LBC. The National Police Chiefs' Council set up a specialist coordination group to bring them together and liaise with US law enforcement.
Thames Valley Police is leading the assessment of misconduct in public office allegations againstAndrewMountbatten-Windsor, 65. Officers have consulted Crown prosecutors about claims he shared confidential trade reports with Epstein during his tenure as UK trade envoy from 2001 to 2011,NBC News reported.
Separately, a claim that a woman was flown to the UK by Epstein in 2010 for an encounter with Andrew at Royal Lodge is under review.
Source: International Business Times UK
