Jurors were told that no evidence had been found of the mysterious ‘Vijay’ or ‘Vicky’ said to have been responsible for having children sexually abused to order.
Mukesh Bharti, 46, is expected to accuse the man of using the Abingdon man’s mobile phones in order to solicit the vile indecent images and videos.
He is also alleged to have modified three videos that appeared to be screen recordings of WhatsApp video calls between the defendant and children in the Far East.
It is said that Vijay, whom the research doctor claimed to have met through his work at the John Radcliffe Hospital, had tried to get the defendant to supply ‘tablets’.
On Thursday (September 14), jurors were told that a number of enquiries had been carried out after lawyers for Bharti submitted a document setting out his defence and identifying Vijay as the man responsible.
READ MORE: WhatsApp 'child sex shows' claim denied by Abingdon man
There was no record of him on the electoral roll or on police computer systems, it was said. Administrators at the John Radcliffe Hospital had been contacted, where the mystery man was said to have been involved in computers or worked as a courier, and there was no record of him being employed directly by the NHS trust or as a contractor.
Following a reference that the men had met in a ‘Bengali shop’ in Headington, two stores in the Oxford neighbourhood were approached. Staff at neither shop said they knew the man.
The defendant’s phones were trawled for the names Vijay and Vicky. There was a WhatsApp contact named ‘Vijay’s Wife’, who had an India-registered telephone number and from whom the defendant had a number of messages and missed calls. The final message was an image of an elderly person in a photo frame. The defendant’s phone replied: “That’s very, very sad.”
Cross-examining the officer in the case, defence brief Colin McCarraher put it to her that those involved in serious organised crime such as drug dealing knew how to ‘make themselves disappear’.
He noted that his client had told detectives in his police interview that he had gone to Abingdon police station to try and report that his phone was, on his case, being ‘bombarded’ with unwanted indecent images of children.
READ MORE: Prosecution's case against Mukesh Bharti - as opened to the jury
However, any CCTV footage from the days he claimed to have gone to the station had been wiped by the time enquiries were made by detectives, the jury was told.
Statements were read from two Thames Valley Police staff members working on the front desk at Abingdon police station when Bharti claimed to have gone in.
Both had checked their log books and neither had any record of someone reporting the unwanted child sex abuse material.
Had someone come into the police station to make such a report, they would have recorded it. One of the ‘police contact enquiry’ officers, Jessica Day, said: “I would at the very least take all of their information including other persons involved and created a crime report.”
Bharti, of Overmead, Abingdon, denies charges of making indecent images of children, causing the sexual exploitation of a child and arranging the travel of another person with a view to sexual exploitation. The trial continues.
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