THE Irish Columban priest Father Shay Cullen yesterday spoke of his role in the capture of Brett Tyler, one of the two paedophiles who murdered nine year old Daniel Handley.
Tyler and his accomplice, Timothy Morss, were this week jailed for life for the murder of the London boy.
Father Cullen, who has campaigned on behalf of street children and prostitutes in the Philippines for over 20 years, alerted Scotland Yard to Tyler's presence in that country.
Tyler and Morss had gone to the Philippines following the murder.
There Tyler fell out with Morss, who returned to England, where he was arrested. Tyler then lived with another man until he, in turn, was arrested.
Fr Cullen told RTE yesterday that he and his co workers had become suspicious of Tyler and had watched him for a few days.
"We were alarmed to find there were small children inside his house, which had a high wall, so we did some research - and we found out that he had a homosexual partner who was a British national and that they had a lot of young boys going into that house.
"Immediately we contacted our own government agents in the city to bring some social workers and be ready when he was arrested. Then we called in the National Bureau of Investigation from Manila, together with the officer of Scotland Yard who flew in to the Philippines. He came up and they made the arrest.
"We found pictures in their house later showing them visiting with children at the river, at waterfalls, taking pictures of nude children. His lifestyle was very simple, it wasn't very luxurious."
He had been shocked to find a letter left by Tyler saying, "Love, Brett, kill the children for me, okay?"
"I found that letter in the house when we searched part of it during the rescue of the small children. We went there and we rescued two children, five and six years old, and another twelve year old boy. We found this letter and we were quite shocked by it. That went to Scotland Yard."
Tyler and his partner ingratiated themselves with parents by paying to send local children to school. "So therefore they got very close to the parents and to the children and it gave them a reason to bring the children to their house.
"Beside the house they converted a kind of garage into a kind of a chapel and they posed as priests. They were inviting all the local people and they had a sign on the wall that said Sunday Mass 3.00 p.m.
These paedophiles are very clever and they know how to use the Church to give themselves a cover to masquerade as Catholic priests and ingratiate themselves in the community and to allay all suspicion.
"The parents were happy to send the kids, thinking that they were getting spiritual guidance and getting tuition money for school. We don't know how many of those boys they actually sexually abused. When we asked around we heard that they had at least nine or 10 boys going to school and visiting them in this house."
Fr Cullen said his campaign against child abuse in the Philipines had won support at government level, but "our biggest problem is local government who are involved in their businesses in tourism and actually have made livelihoods out of sex tourism."