Vietnamese police seek rocker Glitter
HANOI, Vietnam (Reuters) -- Vietnamese police want to talk to Gary Glitter about reports the shamed British glam rocker was seen with girls as young as 15 at a villa he rented, a government spokesman said on Thursday.
The communist southeast Asian nation's official Thanh Nien youth newspaper quoted neighbors in the southern resort town of Vung Tau as saying Glitter -- whose real name is Paul Francis Gadd -- had taken home several girls aged 15 or under.
Residents of the picturesque tourist town on the mouth of the Saigon River had also complained about his singing, the paper said.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Dung told Reuters police wanted to question the 61-year-old rocker about the allegations, which first surfaced in the British tabloid press.
"If we have evidence of child sexual violation, very strict legal measures would be applied," Dung said, adding that Glitter had since disappeared.
The age of consent in Vietnam is 16, and sex with minors is punishable by up to 12 years in jail.
Glitter was sentenced to four months in jail in Britain in 1999 after being found guilty of storing more than 4,000 images of child pornography on the hard drive of his computer.
After his release, he left Britain for Cuba and then later turned up in Phnom Penh.
Child rights activists managed to get him hounded out of Cambodia twice and have his name put on an entry blacklist, although Glitter filed lawsuits last year fighting the deportation orders.
Thanh Nien reported Glitter had been in Vietnam for about a year.
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