Ex-Liverpool CID officer arrested in Thailand on sex slave trafficking charges

May 22 2008 by Richard Down, Liverpool Daily Post

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A FORMER Liverpool detective has been arrested in Thailand for trafficking women to the sex slave trade in Britain.

Ian Shuttleworth, 42, was arrested at his Bangkok apart-ment on Tuesday after a tip off to Thai police.

He is alleged to have escorted women to Britain supposedly to get jobs in Thai restaurants.

He not only charged the women a fee but sold them on, one for £28,000, and allegedly took sexual liberties from his victims in the process.

Shuttleworth was living on a disability pension – while at the same time running a private detective agency checking out whether Thai girlfriends of British holidaymakers were remaining faithful.

Shuttleworth was a detective in the Criminal Investigation Department at Belle Vale. He served in Merseyside police in the mid 80s to 90s and in the Operation Dublin team target-ing drug dealers in Toxteth.

A police source said: “He was one of those people with a vari-ety of different facades. You never knew if you were talking to the real Ian Shuttleworth.”

The arrest followed raids by the Met Police Human Traffick-ing Team early this year in Lon-don. One woman has been arrested and faces a case management hearing at South-wark Crown Court in June.

Police are investigating Shuttleworth’s involvement and have not ruled out bringing him back to the UK to face charges.

Many of the victims in his case claimed they were forced to sleep with men to pay off debts of up to £28,000. He is accused of offering a Thai woman a job in London. He flew with her and once they had entered Britain he allegedly forced her to have sex with him in London, Coven-try and Scotland before he sold her to a brothel madame in a London restaurant.

The victim, who was sold to Pongpoj Pitayanakul, is aged 31, a married woman and one of the nine facing court charges. She told police her father paid Shuttleworth 530,000 Thai baht (£8,300) to get her a visa and job in a restaurant in the UK.

For four years Shuttleworth has been running a private detective agency in Bangkok – Thai-PI (www.thai-pi.com) from a rented suite in the city’s Suk-humvit Road. He works with another former British police-man, John, now back in Britain.

Nobody was available for com-ment at his office yesterday. An English woman who answered his phone, who said she was not related to Shuttleworth, said: “I don’t know what is happening or where he is.”

Among his agency’s special services are ‘Peace of Mind’ reports for people worried about their partner’s fidelity. Advertising on the agency’s website shows pictures of Shuttleworth and Bangkok a-go-go dancers, where he asks: “Wonder what she’s doing? Need Reassurance? Thai Pi. Diligence and Confidentiality.”

In a letter to the Bangkok Post newspaper on Tuesday Alayne Howard, head of Visa Services at the British Embassy in Bang-kok responded to suggestions by a reader that influential agents had been able to easily gain visas for Thai girls to Britain: “We are aware of agents oper-ating in Thailand. They are in no way connected to the Embas-sy and have no influence over the outcome of an application.”

richarddown