Scottish Police Say They Have Lost 22 Sex Offenders

Twenty-two convicted sex offenders have vanished from Scotland’s new monitoring regime, The Herald can reveal.

Some are thought to have fled the country while others are still being sought closer to home, police said yesterday.

Their disappearance was revealed by an increasingly sophisticated system of checks on the 3554 registered offenders living in the community.

advertisementMissing offenders include paedophile Martin Cusick, a 52-year-old former police officer, missing for two and a half years.

Cusick is one of six men from Strathclyde, some of them foreign, who have gone off the radar, from among the 1130 offenders under the scrutiny of the region’s Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (Mappa) system. Mappa was introduced after the killing of Glasgow schoolboy Mark Cummings, 8, by a sex offender.

Tayside Police has also lost track of six offenders while Lothian and Borders said it was looking for five, all of whom are understood to be foreigners who may have left the country. Central Police has four missing men, two of whom may be abroad, and Northern Constabulary is on the hunt for one. Dumfries and Galloway, Fife and Grampian forces said they were missing none.

Senior officers yesterday stressed that the number of offenders who had vanished varied from day to day.

A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland said: “The public should be reassured that this number does not reflect 22 people who have been unaccounted for over a long period of time. In some cases it is down to them moving address, in others they are traced very quickly, sometimes within hours of breaching their conditions.

“A proportion of those listed as missing have actually returned home to their own country and their whereabouts are known.”

Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill this week said he wanted to see the number of missing sex offenders published routinely, in the annual reports of regional Mappa groups.