Glitter in Vietnamese Court: Come again?


Gary Glitter gets 3 years

Vung Tau, Viet Nam, - A Vietnamese court jailed British "glam rocker" Gary Glitter to three years in prison on Friday for molesting two young girls aged 11 and 12.
Judge Hoang Thanh Tung described in graphic detail the offences by the 1970s pop icon in the southern resort town of Vung Tau, drawing gasps from Vietnamese in the courtroom.
He said the 61-year-old Glitter, whose real name is Paul Gadd, ejaculated on the vagina and anus of one of the underage girls and urinated into the mouth of the other.
"The court pronounces the defendant, Paul Francis Gadd, also known as Gary Glitter, guilty of engaging in lewd acts with children," the judge said. "He is sick. He is abnormal," also said the judge.
Defence lawyer Le Thanh Kinh said Glitter would be eligible for parole one year from when he was first detained, in November 2005, as is customary in Vietnam.
Glitter had 15 days to appeal but had not yet decided whether to do so.
"That comes from him, not from me," Kinh told reporters.
The black-shirted Glitter, who was told by the judge to remove his red bandana, stared ahead impassively as the sentence was read out in a courtroom packed with foreign journalists.
But afterwards he lashed out at an unnamed British newspaper he blamed for his troubles.
"It's a conspiracy. You know who. One of Great Britain's newspapers," he told Reuters as he was escorted into a prison van by 10 green-uniformed policemen.
He has already spent more than three months of pre-trial detention in a two-man cell at a windswept concrete prison, surrounded by AK-47-toting guards, mould-encrusted walls and coils of rusting razor wire.
However, British consular officials given access to Glitter said he remained in good health. They also had no complaints about his handling in communist Vietnam since his arrest in November while trying to leave the country.
"He is treated well under Vietnamese law and that's all we can ask for. We are in Vietnam, not in the UK," said Paul Higham, the British vice-consul in Ho Chi Minh City.
"As far as I know, he is well." Three other Vietnamese prostitutes whom Glitter had met while illegally living in Cambodia in 2003 and 2004 and brought to Vung Tau by taxi had helped Glitter procure the girls for paid sex, said the prosecutors' indictment.
The indictment also said pornographic material, including more than 2 300 images and cartoons and over 30 child pornography video clips, was found on Glitter's computer hard drive.
"With this sentence we have sent a signal to people like Gary Glitter who come to Vietnam for that crime," said Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Duc Trinh, deputy chief of the police investigation.
Glitter had maintained his innocence throughout the proceedings and claimed he was teaching the girls English, allowing them to stay overnight because they were scared of ghosts.