BANGALORE: Investigations against British headmaster Paul Meekin , who was dismissed by Trio World School for misbehaving with his students, have hit a dead end. The Bangalore sleuths lack expertise to crack the encrypted files in the alleged pedophile’s laptops.
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The investigators had on February 1 seized two laptops after UK police ordered Meekin’s re-arrest since he was wanted in cases in their country and in Thailand. More than a fortnight later, the investigators are struggling to read data on Meekin’s laptops.
“From one laptop we managed to get a mirror image of all the data he had stored. This runs into hundreds of encrypted files. We do not have experts in Bangalore to crack the files and enable us read them. We have now sent them to the Central Forensic Science Lab, Hyderabad, to open the files. It is sad that Bangalore, despite being the country’s IT capital, is forced to look outside Bangalore,” sources in the investigating agencies told the TOI.
Meekin was arrested by Bangalore police on January 23 after the parents of a student in the school complained against his “inappropriate behaviour” . The headmaster would call the boy to his chamber in the school and make lewd comments , besides using sexually explicit language.
Subsequently, he was released on bail. But on February 1, police re-arrested him following an Interpol alert that he had forged his identity . He has since been lodged in the Parappana Agrahara jail.
“We cannot proceed in the case till the contents of his laptops are made available to us. That will show whether he was a pedophile. There is an urgency for the investigators to know what Paul had in his laptops; who he was in touch with in India and abroad; who his contacts and friends were; and whether he was sending emails to children in the school, among other things. Sending the laptops to Hyderabad lab will delay the investigation. It will take three months for us to get the laptops back with the files,” the investigators said.
