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Direct sex abuse allegation made against Heath

Author
AAP ,
Publish Date
Wed, 5 Aug 2015, 6:35AM
Former UK PM Edward Heath (Getty Images)
Former UK PM Edward Heath (Getty Images)

Direct sex abuse allegation made against Heath

Author
AAP ,
Publish Date
Wed, 5 Aug 2015, 6:35AM

Allegations linking former British prime minister Edward Heath to child sex abuse are threatening fresh disgrace for Britain's political establishment as claims of high-level historic paedophilia pile up.

Heath, who led Britain between 1970 and 1974 and died in 2005, has become the most senior figure to join the ranks of prominent Westminster politicians accused, many of them posthumously, of sexually abusing children.

"I'm in absolutely no doubt that there were a significant number of politicians and many others in high society ... who were committing child sexual abuse and probably continue to do so," Simon Danczuk, an MP with the opposition Labour Party and a leading campaigner on the issue, told Sky News.

Whether Heath was among them is now the subject of fierce debate.

He was drawn into the scandal when the police watchdog said it would investigate a retired policeman's claim that a prosecution was dropped in the 1990s when the accused threatened to expose the ex-PM.

Tuesday's Daily Mirror newspaper carried an allegation from a man who said he was raped by Heath in 1961, aged 12.

Heath is being directly investigated by Scotland Yard over child sex abuse claims, the BBC reports.

Police on the Channel Island of Jersey have also confirmed he features in Operation Whistle, their probe into alleged historic abuse.

Heath is not the first politician accused of abuse.

Others include the late Leon Brittan, interior minister under prime minister Margaret Thatcher; Cyril Smith, a Liberal MP who died in 2010; and Greville Janner, an ex-Labour MP and member of the House of Lords.

Last month, it emerged that in 1986, the MI5 intelligence service had urged a cover-up of claims that an unidentified MP "has a penchant for small boys".

There are suggestions that children were abused at London's exclusive Dolphin Square apartment complex near parliament.

Police are also investigating allegations that abusers including politicians frequented the Elm Guest House in southwest London in the 1970s and 1980s.

Friends of Heath have leapt to his defence.

But Danczuk says it's important the abuse allegations are looked into.

"However high someone has reached in society, even to the level of prime minister, if there are allegations, serious allegations of awful abuse, they need to be investigated," he said.

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