By Ling Hui
KUCHING, Sept 5: The sexual predator who once preyed on 12-year-old boys in Lundu was also one of global law enforcement’s most wanted child sex offenders for almost a decade.
Alladin Lanim, 41, who was sentenced to 16 years in jail and 12 strokes of the cane for 14 charges of molesting five young boys and inducing them to watch pornographic videos by offering to let them play a mobile game, had been active on the dark web for at least 14 years before his recent arrest.
All those years, he had been posting about his exploits on the dark web and boasting on message forums about recording his crimes on children as young as two.
While Alladin pleaded guilty to all 14 charges at three different Sessions Court here on Aug 17, Sarawakians had no idea of his crimes which link him to over 1,000 images and videos showing sexual abuse of minors since 2007.
Today, a news report in The Sydney Morning Herald highlighted how he was brought to justice, from the perspectives of the Australian Federal Police (AFP), Queensland Police, and the Australian Transactions Reports and Analysis Centre (ASUTRAC).
It was following a multi-national internal police report in 2019 listing Alladin’s online alias as one of the top 10 offenders globally in exploitation of children on the Internet, that Alladin caught the attention of the Australian police.
The reason he was a high priority, according to AFP Kuala Lumpur acting senior officer Detective Sergeant Daniel Burnicle, was because of his prolificness with his victims.
At that point in time, however, police had nothing more on Alladin than his anonymous online profile.
A year later in August 2020, the AFP-led operation which includes members of Queensland Police’s Argos taskforce for child victim identification came across an image on social media, suspected to be Alladin.
As the slow, torturing process of going through pictures trying to work out the location where the image was taken dragged on, the Australian government’s financial intelligence agency — one of the teams at AUSTRAC — managed, in 2021, to find the same image among financial and other records.
This time, identifying information was attached and the notorious anonym finally had a name. The only thing left was to catch Alladin.
In July, he was tracked down with the help of Australian investigators to one of Sarawak’s Covid-19 quarantine facilities, where he was serving the mandatory 14-day quarantine period after arriving from Peninsular Malaysia.
On the fifth, Malaysian officers were waiting for him as he was released from isolation.
His charges which he pleaded guilty to in the Kuching Sessions Court were only for five victims, but the Australian investigators identified 34 or more victims he had abused over the years.
Alas, all the dots have been connected and the nightmare of Lundu is finally paying for his crimes. — DayakDaily
