Elm Guest House

The Elm Guest House was a guest house at Rocks Lane, Barnes, in south-west London, run in the early 1980s by Haroon Kasir and Carole Kasir. The writer S. Dovey wrote that it displayed a sign reading "Spartacus, Club - Welcome" and belonged to the Spartacus International network of John Stamford, and described it as a front for an international child-trafficking network serving political and business figures.¹

The Raid and the Inquiry Findings

Elm Guest House, in Rocks Lane, Barnes, south-west London, was run by Haroon and Carole Kasir and advertised as a gay guest house. It came to police notice late in 1981, when someone reported concerns about a 10-year-old boy there to Richmond police station; after a surveillance operation in which two undercover officers entered the house posing as members of the public, the police raided it on the night of June 19, 1982, and arrested twenty people, including the Kasirs. In April 1983 the Kasirs were convicted of running a disorderly house and each sentenced to nine months' imprisonment, suspended for two years, and fined 1,000 pounds. None of the guests was convicted of any offense.²³

Giving evidence to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Commander Neil Jerome of the Metropolitan Police said that the investigation had found evidence of sexual abuse of a single child at the house, the 10-year-old boy, whose account and a medical examination showed extensive abuse, and no evidence that other children had been abused, and that "no individuals of prominence" had been seen there during the surveillance or found there in the raid. A social worker, Andrew Keir, alleged that on the night of the raid the boy had named one of his abusers as "Uncle Leon," who might have been a politician from "the big house," and that the detail had been left out of the interview notes; the Independent Office for Police Conduct found "no substance … at all" to the allegation. Another investigation, Operation Yvonne, examined allegations by a man who had been a 17-year-old masseur at the house that undercover officers had sex with him before the raid and that he was abused in custody, and found no evidence to support them. Jerome called the "Elm Guest House list" of VIP visitors, promoted by Chris Fay and Mary Moss, of "zero evidential value" and its creation "certainly dubious," and noted Fay's conviction for money laundering.³

Carole Kasir was found dead in June 1990; the inquest ruled her death a suicide. At the inquest Fay, of the National Association of Young People in Care, said Kasir had told him boys were trafficked from Grafton Close Children's Home and abused by VIPs at the guest house, and he repeated the allegation in a BBC Panorama program in 2015. The inquiry recorded that no politician or VIP was ever identified as having been involved.²

Allegations

The writer S. Dovey wrote that the raid of June 1982 revealed a price list of sex with boys as young as ten; that twenty-three men were detained in a house with bedroom suites hung with whips, chains and ropes, a lounge bar, a sauna and a screening room for pornography; that police sources said three of the guests were ministers and a fourth a member of the Queen's household; and that the police had been expected to reopen files on the murder of one boy and the disappearance of another. Dovey wrote that Scotland Yard called it a routine brothel investigation while sources close to the inquiry said senior officers had ordered it played down, that The Sunday Times reported Scotland Yard's denial of any security risk or Special Branch role, that the men were released without charge, and suggested that the Attorney General, Michael Havers, had intervened. According to Dovey, the Kasirs were also charged with possessing child pornography, a charge dropped in 1983 after seven hours of seized video were ruled inadmissible.¹

In 1983 the Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens gave the Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, a dossier on members of Parliament and of the royal household whom he alleged belonged to a pedophile ring with ties to the Pedophile Information Exchange, and said he would name them in Parliament. Dovey wrote that Dickens then received death threats, that his home was burgled, and that his name was found in a notebook of the fugitive Arthur Hutchinson.¹

At the 1990 inquest into Carole Kasir's death, according to Dovey, the social worker Mary Moss said Kasir had come to her in 1989 with evidence that boys under fourteen from Grafton Close Children's Home, run by Richmond Council, were supplied to guests of the house, and Moss and Christopher Fay said Kasir had been killed over evidence of its clientele. Fay said Kasir had shown him a photograph of a former Conservative Cabinet minister in a sauna with naked boys, and that a bishop, a High Court judge, a social services director and a businessman appeared on videos made there; Dovey identified the minister as Leon Brittan and named Cyril Smith, exposed after his death as an abuser of boys, as a frequent visitor. The inquiry found that no politician or VIP was ever identified as involved.¹²

Later Investigations

Peter Righton, who held a senior post at the National Children's Bureau and whom Dovey described as the government's leading adviser on child protection, was arrested in 1992 after customs officers intercepted child pornography sent to him from Amsterdam; Dovey wrote that he was a member of the Pedophile Information Exchange named in Dickens's dossier. Dovey also wrote that Moss said in 2013 that Kasir had told her two men, Terry Dwyer and John Rowe, persuaded her in 1979 to turn her house into a sauna for members of Club Spartacus and put her in touch with Stamford's agent Peter Glencross, and that correspondence from Spartacus International addressed to the house in 1981 survives. In an ITV interview Moss described the house as a money-making child pornography operation that filmed boys procured from Grafton Close.¹

In October 2012 the Labour MP Tom Watson asked Prime Minister David Cameron to investigate evidence of a pedophile network linked to Parliament and No. 10, and in November the MP Simon Danczuk made accusations against Cyril Smith; the Metropolitan Police then opened investigations into historical allegations concerning the house.¹