BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 4
TRANSCRIPT OF “FILE ON 4” – “REYNHARD SINAGA: BRITAIN’S MOST PROLIFIC RAPIST”
CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP
TRANSMISSION: Tuesday 3rd November 2020 2000 - 2040 REPEAT: Sunday 8th November 2020 1700 - 1740
REPORTER: Hayley Hassall PRODUCER: Sally Abrahams EDITOR: Carl Johnston
PROGRAMME NUMBER: 20VQ6336LH0 - 1 -
THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.
“FILE ON 4”
Transmission: Tuesday 3rd November 2020 Repeat: Sunday 8th November 2020
Producer: Sally Abrahams Reporter: Hayley Hassall Editor: Carl Johnston
ACTUALITY IN MANCHESTER
EXTRACT FROM PHONE CALL RECORDING
CALL HANDLER: Police emergency.
MAN: Hello, I just, I think some guy has tried to rape me after he took me to his house and I didn’t want to. He forced me to go to his house and then he raped me.
CALL HANDLER: Where are you now?
ORR: You would never feel unsafe if you met him on a street to speak to him, like you could easily believe that he has been a good Samaritan, that he’s helped you out. He looked very much like any other student that you might meet on the street.
CALL HANDLER: Right, this guy who you’ve met, have you just met him tonight?
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MAN: Yeah, I met him last night, I think. I was drinking and he ended up, I think he forced, he slipped me something, like I don’t know, and now, in the morning, he’s like on top of me, like, trying to you know what.
LISA: You can’t underestimate the impact that this news had on men, and some have unfortunately wanted to take their own lives.
CALL HANDLER: I’m going to get an officer to where you are now. Are you okay to wait there while we get an officer to you?
MAN: Yes, yes as long as it’s soon.
ALI: In my 20-year career, I’ve never come across anything like this case before. It’s completely unprecedented. This has been the biggest serial rape case in UK judicial history.
ACTUALITY OF SIRENS
HASSALL: I’m on Albert Square in Manchester’s city centre. Towering above me is the impressive gothic town hall – Manchester’s beating heart. Princess Street is the artery that takes you south east from here – it runs past lots of busy bars, shops and restaurants, then alongside Chinatown before you reach the city’s famous gay village. It’s an area that’s also home to thousands of students. Among them – from 2007 until 2017 – was postgraduate Reynhard Sinaga from Indonesia.
SARAH: Rey was cheerful, calm, very engaging, very charismatic. Anyone who met him would say that.
HASSALL: In 2008, Sarah met Reynhard Sinaga when she was a postgraduate at the University of Manchester. He was studying for a Masters degree. Sarah isn’t her real name, but she’d only talk to me if we agreed not to identify her, so an actor is speaking her words.
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SARAH: I knew him when he first came to Manchester as a student. I was part of a group of friends he had, but I wasn’t close friends. When I was with them, Rey was never actively cruising, looking to pick up someone. He had a lot of attention from gay guys. He had no problem flirting. He was never seen as a party guy that goes crazy on nights out. He was very normal, engaging, friendly. Rey was quite vain. He spent a lot of attention on how he looked, the clothes he wore. His exotic looks made him stand out in a good way in the gay community. I don’t think he’d have any problem to meet any gay guy in a natural way if he wanted to have sex or whatever. But he liked more manly men. That’s his type.
HASSALL: The eldest son of a wealthy businessman, Reynhard Sinaga was born into a conservative Christian family in Sumatra in 1983. Like the rest of Indonesia, it’s an island where being gay is taboo, so Sinaga was forced to keep his sexuality a secret. And when he arrived in Manchester in 2007, he was free to embrace the lifestyle he’d always craved.
SARAH: He liked Manchester. It was a way to be out of the closet in some ways because his family are practising Christians. He said his family didn’t know he was gay. But anyone, within a minute of talking with him, would know he was gay. I think his family is in denial.
HASSALL: What do you know about his family?
SARAH: I met them when they came to visit. They didn’t speak much English. He was very formal towards his family. He’s the oldest of his siblings and that has a weight within the tribe system, the weight of his family name. He didn’t want to go back to Indonesia, so studying was the easiest way for him to keep staying here and live as a student.
HASSALL: Sinaga’s wealthy father was able to help fund his son’s lifestyle from afar, but he also held several part-time jobs which he fitted in around his studies - one of them, working in a bar in Manchester’s gay village, where he’s still remembered.
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MARIA: Very charming, very smiley, always aiming to please and a very sweet boy on the surface.
HASSALL: And how was he at his job?
MARIA: Very good. He was up there with probably top employees that we’ve had. A really nice guy. He’d do his job and he’d go home, then turn up for his shift the next time. He was very polite. His English was very, very good. Even when talking, he spoke a lot with his eyes and his smile, so, you know, that’s quite nerving that somebody could almost like suck people in. He was honest, he was efficient, so yeah, I was horrified.
HASSALL: Sinaga lived here in a small flat in Montana House. It’s a modern, red-brick multistorey building on Princess Street. When he moved here in 2007, I was living just around the corner. I’d walk past here most days on my way to work as a young producer at the BBC on Oxford Road. By day, Sinaga would be studying in his flat - but in the evenings, he had other plans.
ROBERT: I met him in a takeaway. It was at the end of a night out. I was just looking to charge my phone. I asked the takeaway person whether I could charge my phone, and he overheard me and he was like, ‘I’ve got a flat around the corner to charge it there if you want - it’s only like five minutes’ walk away, not even that.’ So, I thought, yeah, I don’t mind doing that.
HASSALL: This is Robert - again, not his real name. Like so many others in this harrowing story, he doesn’t want to be identified, but he was happy to tell us what happened to him, providing we kept him anonymous. After a night out clubbing with friends in 2016, he headed home via a takeaway, which is where he met Sinaga. Can you describe him for me?
ROBERT: He was only a slim, scrawny guy. You know, I thought I could handle myself if anything happened. And then I went back there, he seemed nice enough, so I put my phone on charge. His flat looked just like your average uni accommodation. It looked like quite a nice flat, decent location. There was nothing which - 5 -
ROBERT cont: made you think, you know, like he had something going on. It was just like your average student flat. He started offering me a few drinks and stuff and I said no to them all,
HASSALL: What kind of drink did he try to offer you?
ROBERT: I mean, he had a wide selection, so he was catering for whatever I would have wanted, but just the fact that I didn’t want to drink anything, and he’s not someone I would socialise with or sit down with, like, and have a drink with. But yeah, yeah pretty much he had everything.
HASSALL: So, you said no. Did he try to persuade you to have one?
ROBERT: Yeah, he asked if I wanted another drink. Then I thought, that’s a bit weird. Why would I want different choices of drink, you know what I mean?
HASSALL: After about 15 minutes, with his phone charged to just 5%, Robert made his excuses and left the flat. He took down Sinaga’s number and added him to his contacts, giving him the name ‘Creepy Ray.’ He told him he might get back in touch, but he never did. He didn’t know it then, but Robert had a narrow escape.
MUSIC
HASSALL: Police believe Sinaga spiked his victims’ drinks with so-called date rape drugs like GHB - readily available on the streets of Manchester or online. Toxicologist, Dr Simon Elliott.
ELLIOTT: GHB was designed originally as a medicine for anaesthesia, and then into the late 1990s and 2000, it had gained a reputation as a potential so-called date rape drug, due to the fact that it can cause sedation and sleep in people who take it.
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HASSALL: How does it work?
ELLIOTT: So, essentially it works in the brain and it acts a little bit like alcohol, but if you take too much GHB, you can actually be very sleepy, so it can actively affect your sedation and actually cause people to be unconscious. GHB can also affect memory as well.
HASSALL: Sinaga had such little regard for these men’s lives that Simon Elliot believes he could have killed them.
ELLIOTT: If alcohol is consumed, then many of those effects can be made worse. And the problem is - and this is one of the key issues with GHB - if alcohol is consumed at the same time and there’s quite a large amount there, then that can actually cause death.
HASSALL: Are you saying that some of the victims could possibly have died in this situation?
ELLIOTT: Absolutely, and I was very surprised that no one died.
HASSALL: So, if you were given it, would you know?
ELLIOTT: GHB’s effects are very rapid. If a significant amount is given and consumed, then you could literally fall asleep within minutes.
MUSIC
EXTRACT FROM EMERGENCY CALL RECORDING
CALL HANDLER: Police emergency.
MAN: Hello, I just, I think some guy has tried to rape me after he’s took me to his house and I didn’t want to. He wouldn’t let me leave his house, and then
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MAN cont: I think he slipped me something, like I don’t know, and now, in the morning, he’s like on top of me, trying to you know what.
HASSALL: The voice of the police operator in this recording is real. But, for reasons that will become obvious, the voice of the man who called 999 has been changed.
CALL HANDLER: Do you know his name?
MAN: No, no, I don’t know his name at all. I just know his, where his house is. He’s not left his house since I’ve escaped from it.
HASSALL: When this call came through to Greater Manchester Police just before 6am on Friday 2nd June in 2017, it marked the start of one of the biggest investigations in the force’s history.
MAN: I tried to punch, I tried to push him away. I’ve got blood on me because I tried to hit him to get away from me.
CALL HANDLER: I’m going to get an officer to where you are now. Are you okay to wait there while we get an officer to you?
MAN: Yes, yes as long as it’s soon.
ALI: Within ten minutes of receiving that report, officers have gone upstairs and they find Reynhard Sinaga semi-unconscious on the floor, a lot of blood everywhere.
HASSALL: Detective Chief Inspector Zed Ali is head of the investigation.
ALI: Now, because of what the officers have now seen in terms of the seriousness of the injuries to Sinaga, they’ve gone and arrested the male who reported the initial call to the police for assault. Shortly after, an ambulance arrives to the - 8 -
ALI cont: address. They treat Sinaga and he’s actually carried out of the building in a stretcher and taken to Manchester Royal Infirmary, and the initial prognosis was a suspected bleed on his brain. So, this is the very early stage of the investigation, so we had quite a conflicting report into us. So, we’ve got one where someone is saying he’s been raped by an unknown male, and then on the other side we’ve got Reynhard Sinaga with some serious head injuries.
HASSALL: Sinaga was in hospital with serious injuries and his attacker, who quite literally had blood on his hands, was in custody. But the appalling truth was about to unfold.
GREGORY: He was in and out of consciousness. Medical staff told me that he’d been asking about the whereabouts of his phone.
HASSALL: Detective Inspector Matt Gregory was the first officer to visit Sinaga in hospital, and he was surprised how desperate Sinaga was to be reunited with his phone.
GREGORY: I went back to Montana House and found his phone under his bed where he said it would be, and he provided me with a four-digit pin number. It didn’t work. It was incorrect.
HASSALL: So, he’d given you the wrong pin code to his own phone?
GREGORY: That’s right. He knew that I was in possession of the phone at that point, and he subsequently provided me with the password which unlocked the phone. And it was at that point, when I was at the bedside with Sinaga, when he made several attempts to reach out for the phone and take it from my hand. It was at that point that my level of suspicion was sort of increasing. I just clicked on the photos app on the phone and the last three thumbnails that came up were of a naked part of a male anatomy.
HASSALL: Can you describe what the video footage was?
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GREGORY: The scene in the video was Sinaga’s flat, specifically the bedroom. There was a male lying on the floor, face down, who was clothed, but their trousers and underwear had been pulled down to their knees, and then a naked person, who I was able to tell was Sinaga, approached the male on the floor and commenced committing a sexual offence against him.
HASSALL: In Matt Gregory’s hand was video footage of Sinaga raping a young man. The same young man who admitted attacking Sinaga and who was now in custody on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm. So, this case has just flipped. You’ve just realised you’ve basically arrested the wrong man.
ALI: Yes.
HASSALL: And the criminal is in hospital, being looked after.
ALI: Yeah, absolutely. And then from there, what’s happened, we’ve gone back to Victim 1 to release him.
MUSIC
HASSALL: Because he’s the first to give evidence against Sinaga, detectives call him Victim 1. And when he’s released from custody, Victim 1 discovers the phone in his pocket isn’t actually his. In his haste to escape the flat, he’s grabbed the wrong one.
ALI: The mobile phone he had, that he picked up from the apartment, he says, ‘Oh, this isn’t my phone actually, now I’ve looked at it.’ That was a second phone that Reynhard Sinaga had. That also contained other evidence.
HASSALL: Now, detectives have two of Sinaga’s phones - and mounting evidence that they’re dealing with a serial rapist. What was on that phone, Zed?
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ALI: So, we had hundreds of videos of different men being raped by Reynhard Sinaga. Hundreds.
HASSALL: On Sinaga’s mobile phones and a number of hard drives which were discovered in his flat, were hundreds of videos of rape and assault, thousands of photographs and the personal details of more than 200 men.
ALI: What came back was a vast amount. It was just over three terabytes of data that we had to sift through, images of obscene footage of men being abused. He was recording it in his phones and then backing them up on either laptops and storage devices that we found within his apartment.
HASSALL: It took weeks for a team of officers to view all the video evidence, and at the end of it they’d identified almost 200 victims - all of them drugged and raped in Sinaga’s Manchester flat.
ALI: What stands out with this is the graphic nature of what’s been on there. It’s not something that anyone should have to watch, videos of men being raped.
HASSALL: Reynhard Sinaga arrived in 2007, didn’t he, and he was arrested in 2017, so essentially there was a serial rapist at large in Manchester for a 10-year period. How has that happened?
ZED: It’s happened by his manipulation, by this facade that he’s put on.
ORR: You would never feel unsafe if you met him on a street to speak to him. You could easily believe that he has been a Good Samaritan, that he’s helped you out. He looked very much like any other student that you might meet on the street.
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HASSALL: Greater Manchester Police’s Dorothy Orr was given responsibility for gathering and managing evidence in the investigation - now called Operation Island.
ORR: He’s not very big, he’s quite slight. He’s just a very insignificant man. Some of these victims are very tall, very well-built, sort of muscular people, so he took control of them. To have somebody in in his flat for hours and hours and hours and rape them a number of times, he likes to be in control.
MUSIC
HASSALL: Sinaga’s modus operandi often involved watching the streets from the windows of his flat in the heart of Manchester’s clubland, looking for potential victims, mostly straight men who’d often had a lot to drink and whose judgement was already impaired. He’d befriend them, playing - as we’ve heard - the Good Samaritan, offering them a place to stay, a drink or maybe somewhere to charge their phone.
ALI: I’ve actually got CCTV where, within 60 seconds of Sinaga leaving his apartment, he’s walking back with his victim, who’s clearly drunk, he’s staggering. That’s just absolutely astonishing, within 60 seconds to be able to do that.
HASSALL: He can go out of his flat, find someone he’s never met before, pick them up and persuade them to come back to his flat in 60 seconds?
ALI: Yes, yes he has. He’ll know that when people are drunk, their safety measures are lowered, their guard is down.
HASSALL: Other than the fact Victim 1 escaped his attacker and called the police, there’s very little else in his testimony that’s unique. His story would become a familiar one to the officers investigating the case.
MAN 2: We were out for a night out at Factory night club and in the early hours I lost my three friends, so I went outside to see if I could contact them. Ten
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MAN 2: minutes passed and, while I was outside, Mr Sinaga came up to me and asked me how I was, who I was, why I was outside. As a fellow student, I thought he was just looking after me, checking a fellow student was all right. We started talking for 10, 15 minutes. Once that happened, he offered me inside, into his flat to keep warm while I waited to contact my friends. There seemed no problem with it. I followed him inside and went with him into the flat, where we were still chatting about school, college, university. I just thought students helping each other out in Manchester, it’s a big city, we were helping each other out. Then, when I went inside, this is when he offered me a drink, two drinks. I went to the toilet, as by this point I’d had a few drinks and I needed a wee. I’ve come back to his living room. He had two shots, a red one and a see-through one. I took two shots, I took one straight after the other. Then, from that point on, I don’t have any recollection still to this day. Until 6 o’clock in the morning, that’s when I woke up and found him on top of me.
ACTUALITY ON PRINCESS STREET
HASSALL: Looking up to Sinaga’s flat from down here on the street, I can see that it must have been the perfect vantage point for him to identify his victims. Many of them will have been leaving nightclubs or one of the several bars all within a stone’s throw of here.
ACTUALITY IN APARTMENT BUILDING
HASSALL: He’d then bring them back here, into the building and up to his flat - a short journey which took seconds for the two hundred plus men who thought they had nothing to fear. I’ve retraced their steps. And here I am, just walking into the front door of Sinaga’s flat. Quite a spacious hallway with two bedrooms leading off the corridor, and I’m walking into now what is the sort of living room/kitchen. It’s got two sofas up against a wall, a TV and a dining table, just in front of two large windows. It’s a corner plot, so you can see both Princess Street and Charles Street. I can see all the nightclubs and restaurants from here. We’ve got Factory nightclub next to us, Fifth Avenue across the road and, just further to my left, I can see all the way to Canal Street. From here, Sinaga could see everyone who came and went out of those clubs very clearly, and he could be downstairs, I’d say, in a matter of a minute. - 13 -
MUSIC
HASSALL: Being in Sinaga’s old flat made me feel uneasy, knowing how so many lives had been so badly damaged as a result of the horrific sexual abuse that had taken place there. Yet, despite the fact Sinaga raped more than 200 men, not a single one of them ever came forward to police until he was convicted. They were so heavily drugged that, in the vast majority of cases, when they finally came round, they had absolutely no recollection of what had happened to them. Instead it was down to the police to identify the victims. Dorothy Orr again.
ORR: Sinaga took trophies from a lot, if not most of his victims, so those trophies came in different forms, so sometimes they were a Facebook profile, which he would have a snapshot of and kept on his phone. Sometimes it was passports, sometimes it was driving licenses. It took a considerable amount of time to match up the snapshot photographs of the Facebook profiles with a video of an offence, so then it was a matter of tracing them through whatever means we could and then making a time and date and arrange to go and see them.
HASSALL: And that led to perhaps the toughest, most heartbreaking part of this huge investigation. Telling dozens of young men - some with only a vague suspicion that something strange had happened to them, some with no idea at all – that they had been raped.
ORR: Never, in all the time we’ve worked within the Rape Unit, had we had to go to somebody and tell them that they’d been raped.
HASSALL: It was Dorothy Orr’s job to break the news to victims. She travelled across the country with support workers from St Mary’s Sexual Referral Centre in Manchester. It was the first time in Greater Manchester Police’s history that they had worked with counsellors to support and help the victims from their first contact.
ORR: When you first meet them, you’re having a normal everyday conversation. But in the back of your mind, you actually know at some point I’m
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ORR cont: actually going to have to tell this person, I believe you’ve been raped. And you know once you’ve told somebody, there’s no going back. Their life is going to change.
HASSALL: Lisa Waters from St Mary’s Sexual Referral Centre was responsible for caring for victims when they were told what had happened to them.
WATERS: Some men were very, very angry and wondered why we were coming to tell them something that they had no knowledge about and that could considerably impact on the rest of their lives. There were some men who were completely emotionless and there were some men who were very visibly upset. You know, you can’t underestimate the impact that this news had on men.
ORR: Sometimes it made it easier for them to understand what had happened on that night out, but it was never what they wanted to hear and I don’t think it was ever what they expected to hear.
WATERS: We’ve supported over 70 men now, and some have unfortunately wanted to take their own lives, some have had relationship breakdowns because it’s impacted on their self-esteem and their emotional health so much that they’ve not been able to carry on either physical relationships or emotional relationships. We’ve seen family breakdowns because of this, and also we’ve seen people who have become completely numb.
HASSALL: Clinical psychologist Sam Warner has investigated the psychological effects and long-term impacts of Sinaga’s crimes against these men.
WARNER: For a lot of those victims, they had no idea that they’d been raped, so all of the feelings that people would ordinarily experience during being raped, they were going to experience that, as they were told, so the trauma would be associated with that telling. But thereafter, all of the effects of rape, all of the horrible and hurt feelings that come from it would still be there, even if those people didn’t have any direct memories of it. What they would know is that they have been violated, that their power had been taken away, that their choice and their ownership of their body is changed, whether they have a direct memory or not. - 15 -
HASSALL: So, Sinaga didn’t just violate them that night. He’s continuing to affect them for the rest of their lives really.
WARNER: Yeah. So, there’s the impact of the rape itself. He also stole objects, he took money, he went through their pockets, he befriended them on Facebook. So, like other serial rapists, he took trophies, and this is a way of extending that control and providing more gratification for him. And as we know, he took videos of the rapes that he did, so he took from those men in multiple ways, not just in terms of the act, but in terms of the ongoing violation and gratification that he got from owning part of them.
HASSALL: Sinaga used his charm and friendly disposition to not only ensnare his victims but to boast to his circle of friends. Police found many messages which he’d sent to them from his numerous phones.
ACTUALITY – PING OF MOBILE PHONE
READER IN STUDIO: I didn’t get my New Year’s kiss, but I’ve had my first sex in 2015 already. I met him in the Factory next to my building. Straight, 22, playing football. He was straight in 2014. 2015 is his breakthrough to the gay world.
WARNER: Part of what he was doing was knitting together his fantasy world, and part of that is presenting himself to his friends and the general public as this nice person. And indeed, if he couldn’t be a nice person, he couldn’t have groomed those men in the moments that he did to get them back to his flat if he didn’t look unthreatening. We still believe that we can see rapists, that they look a particular way - and they don’t. They come in all shapes and sizes. They come from all over the world. They rape men and women, boys and girls, and they live amongst us. We cannot see them that easily. Otherwise, they wouldn’t get away with it. And indeed, Sinaga, if he acted like he did in private with his friends, his family and at the church, he would have been arrested.
MUSIC
HASSALL: Reynhard Sinaga was charged with 159 sexual offences – including 136 rapes – against 48 men. He pleaded not guilty to all charges, so - 16 -
HASSALL cont: each of the 48 victims had to attend court. The trial took 18 months and was split into four separate court cases, each with about twelve victims and each with a separate jury. Ian Rushton, from the Crown Prosecution Service, was responsible for that decision.
RUSHTON: First of all, you have to make any case understandable and digestible to a jury. It’s hard going, watching and listening to this stuff. To have had one very, very lengthy trial, you know, with all our 48 victims in there, would have swamped a jury. And secondly, I didn’t want to make it just a conveyor belt with, you know, victim number 37, victim 42. For each of these men, this case represents something of a life- changing episode.
HASSALL: The dozens of victims who gave evidence could not know the full extent of what they’d be confronted with in court. They all had to re-live events leading up to and after the sexual assaults. Many had to watch the videos of their ordeal, being violated by Sinaga - all while he watched on from the dock, smiling throughout. Finally, they faced interrogation by Sinaga’s defence team - accused of being willing participants in the sexual activity that took place.
RECONSTRUCTION OF EXCHANGE IN COURT
BARRISTER: He asked you whether you would be interested in that sort of roleplay.
VICTIM: No recollection of this either.
BARRISTER: You said you would give it a go.
VICTIM: No recollection of that either.
BARRISTER: He told you that it made him feel sexy if he recorded it.
VICTIM: No recollection of this either.
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RUSHTON: Many of the people who watched the trial and observed him during the trial came to the conclusion that he derived yet further pleasure from making our victims relive the ordeal, having to watch themselves on video, having to say, ‘Yes, that’s me, and I didn’t consent to any of this activity.’
BARRISTER: He also told you that because of his particular interests, as it were, he wanted the submissive person to be unmoving, just stay absolutely still, so he could feel totally in control.
VICTIM: No recollection of that either.
BARRISTER: Nothing like that said?
VICTIM: No. No.
RUSHTON: He tried to maintain a quite ludicrous defence that this was all part of some willing role play that the victims engaged in with him quite consensually. One only has to look at the video recordings to see that that was just a ridiculous line of defence, but he’s entitled to put that defence to a jury.
ORR: They were faced then with Sinaga sat there watching them all the way through, with complete lack of emotion when some of these young men physically cried in the witness box, and showed no remorse, no compassion, no emotional attachment to what was happening in the courtroom at all.
HASSALL: I’ve been in court here in Manchester where I saw Sinaga for myself. He was beamed on a live link from prison onto a large TV screen in the middle of the room. He was clean shaven, with shoulder length glossy black hair, wearing a blue shirt, a peach jumper and smiling throughout the entire court proceedings, that sinister smile. He looked happy to be there.
MUSIC
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HASSALL: Since Sinaga’s conviction in January, police have told File on 4 that a large number of men have come forward to say they fear they were also raped by him, and there are 68 victims who police say they have been unable to identify from the video footage. That means there are many men still out there who could be suffering, feeling like they have been harmed in some way and not getting the help they need.
WATERS: Even if they don’t want to report to the police, we would urge people to come forward for support and just to offload really, because I think, you know, sexual violence is a very isolating crime. And I suppose in this instance, the people who are the victims don’t necessarily know what’s happened to them, but they might have a suspicion that something has happened, and that’s really hard to cope with if you’re just thinking about it on your own.
RUSHTON: We don’t know how many victims in total, because our sources really are only the devices that we have recovered. He may have in the past had other devices which we’ve never traced, there might be occasions when he didn’t record what he’d done.
HASSALL: So, you think there could be more victims out there?
RUSHTON: I’d be surprised if there weren’t. Sinaga’s time in this country has not been completely confined to working and living in Manchester. He’s had connections with other principally northern cities, so we don’t know what, if anything, has gone on there. But he ran a sophisticated modus operandi, so it wasn’t just a spur of the moment thing. He had his equipment ready to commit these offences.
MUSIC
HASSALL: Sinaga was given a life sentence, with the possibility of parole after 30 years. For many of the victims, that just isn’t long enough.
MAN 3: I want Sinaga to spend the rest of his life in prison. Not only for what he has done to me, but for what he has done to the other lads and the misery and the stress he has caused them. - 19 -
MAN 4: The perpetrator has taken a part of me that I will never get back, and deserves the largest sentence possible.
HASSALL: Within the next month, the Court of Appeal is due to rule on a challenge to Sinaga’s sentence. The Attorney General’s office has described it as unduly lenient and wants him to spend the rest of his life in prison. If the appeal is successful, Reynhard Sinaga will be the UK’s first non-homicide criminal to be given a life sentence with no parole.
MAN: Sinaga shouldn’t be allowed out of prison ever, he’s going to prison for the rest of his life. That’s how I’ve managed to block it out and get on with my life, and by kind of blocking out the bit that I don’t know. I got a bit of payback, from me stopping it. I’ve just tried to get on with my life and get on with it. I’ve had the help of my friends and family and the support in my area to make sure I was all right, and I’d say to anyone who thinks it might have happened to them, it’s best to step forward and to deal with it, because this is what Sinaga wanted - for it to kill us from the inside, but we need to go out and say it’s not a bad thing, it’s not our fault. It’s his fault.