Wong “realises he should never have accepted” claims made by accomplice
Court hears reference from MP who previously worked with Wong
Father of child still “trolled” by Wong’s supporters
The North Wales Chronicle reports from the court sentencing of Wilfred Wong and his accomplices, following their convictions for child kidnap:
Nicholas Williams, for Wong, said his client had been on a a “rescue mission”.
Wong had worked in human rights for 30 years and Mr Williams read out a reference on behalf of Sir Edward Leigh MP which stated Wong had done “good work” writing letters from victims to be sent to ambassadors.
He said: “Mr Wong’s motivation was not to cause harm to this child but to prevent harm.
“Mr Wong’s motives were good albeit misguided and misplaced. But his actions were not good because they crossed that line into criminality.”
Wong, 56, was fed “misinformation” by Anke Hill about alleged abuse.
Mr Williams said: “This fed into Mr Wong’s already established beliefs of the prolific nature of SRA (Satanic Ritual Abuse).
Wong thought a kidnap plot using a knife “was the lesser of two evils”.
“But he realises he should never have accepted everything she (Anke Hill) was telling him.”
The reference to “Wong’s motivation” seems to be Williams’s own mitigation argument rather than part of Leigh’s statement, although the distinction is not quite clearly made. By “victims”, Leigh presumably means persecuted Christians, rather than supposed “victims” of SRA; more on this below.
Wong’s apparent repudiation of Hill will be welcome to the father of the kidnapped child, who told the court that he continues to suffer “malicious online trolling by friends of Wilfred Wong and his Satanic ritual abuse agenda”. Hill had previously made a false report about him to the authorities, and the court heard she had “also offered to pay someone £10,000 to have him killed”. Even now, Wong has radicalised supporters who describe him as “wrongfully convicted”,
However, Wong’s change of heart is difficult take seriously – previously, there hasn’t been a single “Satanic Ritual Abuse” allegation in the land that he hasn’t enthusiastically taken up, and his admission is completely at odds with his court testimony, which was that he just happened to be in a car with some people when to his surprise they decided to kidnap a child. It is typical, though, of a man who continues to blame others for his predicament. Hill probably did tell Wong things that he wanted to hear, but he chose not to do any due diligence and there is no doubt that he orchestrated the kidnap plot, during which he waved a knife at a woman.
As an evangelical, Wong has been obsessing over Satanic Ritual Abuse for years, and more recently he has been fêted by the “alternative media” crowd, appearing in interviews with the likes of Jon Wedger, Shaun Attwood and UK Column’s Brian Gerrish. Edward Leigh’s intervention, in contrast, highlights Wong’s establishment connections. Old details archived on the website of the House of Commons lists him as “Researcher and Parliamentary Officer, Jubilee Campaign”. This is a high profile and respected lobby group that campaigns on behalf of persecuted Christians and on issues of child protection around the world; its founder, Danny Smith, worked closely with Lord Alton in establishing the organisation, and in 2005 Alton told parliament that
Jubilee Campaign is the secretariat of the All-Party Group on Street Children. I particularly commend the work of its administrator, Mr Wilfred Wong, the human rights lawyer.
Wong authored written evidence submitted by the campaign to parliament on matters relating to the plight of Iraqi Christians following the fall of Saddam Hussein and to minorities in Burma, and he has links with Chaldo-Assyrian organisations as well as a children’s charity in Egypt. In 2011, Leigh echoed Alton’s earlier comment with his own reference to Wong in Parliament:
I pay tribute to Mr Wilfred Wong, who for 20 years has helped MPs to raise the plight of persecuted Christians in numerous letters to the Foreign Office.
This focus does not mean that Wong’s obsession with SRA was just some private eccentricity unrelated to his work in Parliament; way back in 2002 Alton actually chaired a meeting on the subject organised by Wong. As the Daily Telegraph reported:
RITUAL satanic abuse is back. Yesterday, a private meeting at Westminster, chaired by Lord Alton, discussed assaults on children by hooded, chanting Satanists. “You may be aware,” the organisers said, “that, for several years, there have been reports of the ritual abuse of children and in some cases ritual murder. The rituals reportedly often involve the Black Mass and the wearing of robes. Adult survivors of ritual abuse are divulging important evidence regarding the large scale of this problem in the UK.”
One of the organisers, Wilfred Wong, an evangelical Christian, is campaigning for ritual abuse to be made a specific crime, so that the Satanists – responsible for “hundreds, if not thousands” of sexual assaults and murders – can be brought to justice. “But so far little has been done,” he says plaintively.
Tellingly, unlike Edward Leigh, Alton has not to my knowledge made any public comment about Wong’s conviction.
Note on sentencing
It was originally announced that Wong had been sentenced to 22 years in prison, although it later transpired that this actually meant 17 years plus 5 years on licence. One of his accomplices, a therapist named Janet Stevenson (blogged here), was similarly said to have received 20 years, which meant 15 years plus 5 years on licence. Hill got 14.5 years. Of the other defendants, Stevenson’s husband Edward Stevenson got 8 years, Jane Going-Hill got 4.5 years and Karen Ellis-Petley 4 years. Going-Hill’s partner, a retired psychiatric nurse named Robert Frith, took his own life while in prison on remand, and one defendant, Karren Sawford, was acquitted.
Their ages as given last November were as follows: Anke Hill, 51; Jane Going-Hill, 59; Robert Frith, 65; Edward Stevenson, 68; Janet Stevenson, 66; and Wilfred Wong, 55.
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