Abuse scandal rocks Germany

German police are hoping the ground will thaw enough this week for them to start digging in a quarry in their hunt for the body of a five-year-old boy whose death at the hands of a paedophile ring has sent shockwaves through the country.

The death of the boy, known just as Pascal, is the only one attributed to the ring but he was not alone in being abused by the group. A friend of his who is now eight is also said to have been a victim, as well as a girl of a similar age and an unknown number of others.

Police say the ring was run by a woman, Christa Weyand, named in Germany only as 50-year-old Christa W, who served for three years as a voluntary lay magistrate in the local youth court.

Twelve men and women have now been arrested and are in custody, though not yet charged, while police try to piece together the pattern of abuse, which mainly took place in the back of a seedy pub across the road from the youth court - 100 yards from the dead boy's home.

The big question facing the authorities in Saarbrücken is how Christa W came to work in the justice system even though she was running a pub known to be a hang-out for prostitutes and drug dealers. She has also been accused of renting rooms at inflated prices to vulnerable people on housing benefit. Her pub, the Pilsstube, was so notorious it was known locally as 'guest house of the golden shot'.

In 1995 she fostered a baby boy and obtained trusteeship over his mentally disabled mother 'at the mother's request'.

Despite repeated reports of neglect and abuse of the boy, who is said to have been undernourished and beaten by various friends of the two women, he remained in her 'care' for nearly six years, including most of the time between 1997 and 2001 when she worked in the youth court.

Now the authorities are talking of the 'criminal energy' with which they were fooled by Christa W, who described herself as a housewife when applying for her court position. Dr Kurt Wahrheit, head of the town's youth department, said the files relating to Christa W's approval as lay magistrate no longer existed.

The boy was only removed from Christa W and placed in a different foster home when, in January 2001, Christa W's brother complained to the authorities that the boy was being neglected and beaten.

Reports that the child was subjected to sustained sexual abuse by Christa W, his mother and the male partners of both women, only emerged at the end of 2002, giving police a vital clue to finding his missing friend Pascal, who had disappeared without trace at the end of September 2001.

It now appears that he was in the back room of Christa W's pub being sexually abused by locals who paid Christa W for time with him. Police say that some of the men and women they have been questioning told of hitting Pascal to keep him quiet.

But it seems he was hit so hard and so many times that eventually he stopped moving and the adults panicked and put the boy's body in a car, drove it across the border to France and buried it in a quarry. The authorities say he was killed on the same day he went missing.

The Burbach area of Saarbrücken, where the crimes are alleged to have taken place, is a run-down, sordid area, awash with the detritus of poverty. One seasoned German reporter said: 'I'm shocked at this place, genuinely shocked. People are bearing children just to get the social payments. I have never seen anything so horrible. The children are growing up surrounded by alcoholics, drug addicts and prostitutes.'

German magazine Der Spiegel reports today that Christa W was not only known to police, she was a small-time grass, telling officers about crime-related conversations she overheard in the pub.

One officer is quoted saying, 'When I wanted to hear something, of course I asked her, and not just me, other colleagues did this too.' Regional police were also investigating Christa W on suspicion of drug smuggling and even bugged the phones in her flat as well as in the Tosa Klause.

Now Germans are asking how, if all this energy was being spent watching Christa W, her alleged abuse of children did not come to light.