Film director Roman Polanski has been taken into custody in Switzerland and faces extradition to the US for having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977.
Mr Polanski, 76, was detained in Zurich on Saturday as he travelled from France to collect a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival.
He is being held under a 2005 international alert issued by the US.
Mr Polanski has been to Switzerland before, but this time US authorities apparently knew of his trip in advance.
That gave them time to prepare the groundwork for his arrest and send a provisional arrest warrant to Swiss authorities, judicial officials said.
A Swiss spokesman said the US would now have to make a formal extradition request.
The director can contest his detention and any extradition decision in the Swiss courts, he added.
Mr Polanski’s lawyer, Georges Kiejman, said he planned to challenge his client’s arrest.
“We are going to try to lift the arrest warrant in Zurich,” he told France Info radio. “The [extradition] convention between Switzerland and the United States is not very clear.”
Mr Polanski fled the US in 1978 after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with an underage girl.
He was initially indicted on six counts and faced up to life in prison.
In recent years, he has tried to have the rape case dismissed, claiming the original judge, who is now dead, arranged a plea bargain but later reneged.
Earlier this year, Judge Peter Espinoza agreed there was misconduct by the judge in the original case, but said Mr Polanski must return to the US to apply for dismissal.
Mr Polanski’s lawyers said he would not return to the US because he would be immediately arrested as a fugitive.
The victim at the centre of the case, Samantha Geimer, has previously asked for the charges to be dropped, saying the continued publication of details “causes harm to me, my husband and children”.
She has also called the court’s insistence that Mr Polanski appear in person “a cruel joke”.
‘Shock and dismay’
The Paris-born Polish filmmaker – who is also a French citizen – has not set foot in the US for more than 30 years.
His Oscar for directing 2002 film The Pianist was collected by Harrison Ford, who had previously starred in his 1988 thriller, Frantic.
France’s culture minister said he was “dumbfounded” by Mr Polanski’s detention in Switzerland.
Frederic Mitterrand said he “strongly regrets that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already experienced so many of them”.
He added that French President Nicolas Sarkozy was “following the case with great attention and shares the minister’s hope that the situation can be quickly resolved”.
The organisers of the Zurich Film Festival said Polanski’s detention had caused “shock and dismay”, but that they would go ahead with a planned retrospective of the director’s work.
A special ceremony is planned for Sunday night “to allow everyone to express their solidarity for Roman Polanski and their admiration for his work”, festival managers said in a statement.
Meanwhile, British author Robert Harris – who had been working with Mr Polanski on a film adaptation of his novel The Ghost – said he was taken aback by the weekend’s events.
“One of the reasons I’m absolutely shocked and stunned by his arrest is that we have worked together extensively in Switzerland, where he has a home,” Harris said.
“If he was such a wanted criminal why did they let him own a house and travel back and forth freely?”
But justice officials in both Switzerland and the US said the difference this time was that a provisional arrest warrant had been sent.
William Sorukas, chief of the US Marshals Service’s domestic investigations branch, told the Associated Press that investigators learned about the trip days in advance and were therefore able to prepare for an arrest.
“There have been other times through the years when we have learned of his potential travel but either those efforts fell through or he didn’t make the trip,” he said.
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The hypocrisy of the feminist shows its evil teeth yet again. These evil old bitches use “child protection” propaganda to enact statutory rape laws so that they might stand a chance of finding a husband. If a 10 year old french girl can easily, and consensually, give birth without any ill consequences then why should it be forbidden if it happens to be with an older man who is more likely to be able to support the baby’s welfare with a job far more stable than that of a teenagers? Are 30 year old men more evil, manipulative, and abusive than sex crazed 13 year old men; HA! what hypocrisy. In high-school I am expected to consider all these girls as “hot stuff”, but as soon as I turn 18 I am suddenly supposed to consider these girls unattractive… WHAT! Hot is Hot; end of story!
The christian bible is no different regarding age of marriage. Love is love regardless of age, arranged or not.
A fitting punishment would be to circumcise Polanski…from his nutsack down.
The learned rabid rabbi would be standing in line for piece of the action. They love sucking dick, but they prefer younger boys.
no wonder that the Germans incarcerated so many criminals in concentration camps !
See what US Catholics think about this…..go to the Link
Can the Catholic Church bashers and Polanski groupies please call off the hound dogs or sic ’em this-away or that-away to make things a little less hypocritical?
October 14, 2009
Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on a front-page news story in today’s New York Times on the problem of child sexual abuse:
Reporter Paul Vitello shows the shocking extent of child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community. He also details the cover-ups that have long been aided and abetted by law enforcement.
Where have all the church-and-state advocates been all these years when Orthodox rabbis were allowed by the D.A.’s office to settle these cases “internally”? Where have all the professional victims’ groups been in staging protests outside synagogues? Where have all the sue-happy lawyers been seeking to plunder the Orthodox? Where have all the comedians and late-night entertainers been in cracking jokes about rabbis raping kids?
It’s not just Orthodox Jews who have been given a pass: no group has gotten away easier than public school employees. Consider this. Because public school students have only 90 days to file suit, it is already too late to prosecute a teacher—in virtually every state—who molested a minor as recently as last spring. But if the offense took place in a Catholic school, the student has years to file suit. Not only that, molesting teachers are still shuffled from one school district to another; it’s called “passing the trash.”
Orthodox Jews try cases of child rape in rabbinical courts. Imagine if the Catholic Church failed to report abuse cases to the authorities and decided instead to institute its own ecclesial courts? Today’s article quotes a Jewish attorney urging law enforcement to recognize “religious sensitivities” for the guilty by seeking alternatives to prison. Allow a Catholic attorney to advise the same and it’s called corruption.
Last year, 40 minors in this small Jewish community said they were abused. Last year, there were 10 such allegations in the entire Catholic Church in all 50 states. Catholics are fed up with the duplicity. It’s not just Roman Polanski who can rape and run with impunity these days. The politics of child rape is sickening.
Single-Payer GRAYSON Single-Payer
…It would have been just too damn expensive to remove all that asbestos from the Twin Towers…
As the 9/12 Tea Party looks into the events of 9/11 they have many questions concerning the Official Story.
They know not to trust the Government & Media.
Only the guilty fear inquiry.
An ill wind comes arising
Across the cities of the plain
There’s no swimming in the heavy water
No singing in the acid rain
Red alert
Red alert
Here it is, a new case against a jew in San Jose. DAVID ADLER, a jew…
Former San Jose Boy Scout leader sentenced for possession of kiddie porn
By Tracey Kaplan
San Jose Mercury News
Posted: 09/29/2009 04:37:57 PM PDT
A former San Jose Boy Scout leader must register as a sex offender for life and perform 200 hours of community service for possession of child pornography in an investigation triggered by customs agents at San Francisco’s airport who searched his laptop and found the images.
David Adler, 49, also is prohibited from participating in any organized activity involving minors while he is on probation for three years under the sentence imposed Monday by Judge Rodney Stafford in Santa Clara County Superior Court.
Adler was returning home from the Phillipines and London in October 2005 when he was stopped by customs agents who found pornography involving children of both sexes on his laptop, according to Amy Cornell, a spokeswoman for the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office. Whether that search was triggered by a tip or was random is unclear.
Prosecutors then obtained warrants to search Adler’s computers at home and at work, and more child pornography was discovered. Adler worked at KLA Tencor as a chief technologist at the time.
Cornell said Adler was a Scoutmaster of a troop for many years, but prosecutors are uncertain whether he was serving in that capacity at the time of his arrest.
The case was filed as a misdemeanor because state law at the time did not allow one count of possession of child pornography to be filed as a felony. The maximum punishment for such a misdemeanor conviction is one year in county jail. Today, the case could be filed as a felony with a maximum sentence of three years in state prison.
Every jew is a childmolester. The jiddish talmud says: ‘ok for a jew to violate a 3-yr old babygirl, if the girl is goyim (non-jew)…’
Jews have a extreme obsession for homosexuality. Its a genetic failure.