An Irish paedophile ex-priest, who confessed to having sexually abused at least 25 children in California, US, between the late 1970s and early 1990s, has been arrested in the Algarve.
Oliver O’Grady was taken into custody on Monday (October 21) by Portugal’s PJ criminal police acting on a European Arrest Warrant.
A PJ statement explained that he was “wanted by the Irish authorities on suspicion of a crime of child pornography.”
“This individual, who had already served prison time for similar crimes in the USA, returned to his homeland where he allegedly committed a new crime.
“He then moved to Portugal and the Algarve where he has now been located and arrested. He has been remanded in prison after a court appearance pending his hand-over to the Irish authorities,” said a statement from the force.
O’Grady moved to the US in 1971 after being ordained into the priesthood, serving as a priest in several places in California.
He was eventually exposed for his crimes in the early 1990s after having admitted to abusing two young brothers while living in the US.
He was jailed for 14 years but released on parole after seven years before being deported back to Ireland in 2000.
Six years later, a documentary film called ‘Deliver Us from Evil’ that explored O’Grady’s life and saw him confessing to having sexually abused at least 25 children in California was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It lost to former US presidential candidate Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.
British press reports that O’Grady was jailed for another three years in 2012 for possession of large quantities of images of child abuse, which were found on his laptop after he left it on a plane.
Reports The Mirror, a staff member examined the computer and alerted police after coming across the files. O’Grady pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to three counts of possessing child pornography.
The paper says that a court prosecutor said they had found nearly 280,000 images on O’Grady’s laptops and hard drives, the majority showing children in sexual poses, as well as more than 1,000 child pornography video files.
