An elderly Swiss man was recently sentenced to merely 16 years in prison for sexually abusing 80 children in Thailand in the span of over a decade.
On Thursday, the court in Gruyère, Switzerland, found the 72-year-old man from Lucerne guilty of human trafficking and intercourse with minors.
The unnamed man reportedly exploited boys as young as 10 years old while he was living in Pattaya between 2002 and 2013, according to Swissinfo.
The prosecutor said the man had “acted with perversity and contempt, denying the humanity and dignity of the children.”
Prior to this case, the pedophile had already been convicted of abusing minors back in 1980 and 1991 in Fribourg and Valais, Switzerland.
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Upon his conviction, he tried to flee the country, but Valais police caught up with him in Thailand.
After finishing his sentence in Switzerland, he returned to Thailand in 1996 where he opened a bar with a hotel room.
The bar was reportedly the site of his criminal acts, which include taking pornographic photos of his young victims, performing sexual acts on them, and pushing them into prostitution to his European clients.
Authorities would later find thousands of sexually explicit pictures of the boys on his computers.
Out of his 80 victims, only three were represented by lawyers, who demanded compensation between $43,000–$53,000 for moral injury.
The ruling of the Gruyère court included payment of an undisclosed amount to the victims.
According to the court, the man “had treated his victims as goods and sex toys and had never shown any remorse.”
When Thai authorities began investigating him for charges related to pedophilia, he returned to Switzerland in 2014, the Local reports.
Swiss authorities would later learn about the charges and begin their investigation in January 2015. He was arrested before he could fly back to Asia.
