A Fife-born woman accused of horrific child abuse in the Philippines is thought to have gone on the run.
Lilian May Thomson, 66, has disappeared from her squalid home on the island of Luzon, where she is alleged to have kept children captive as sex slaves for tourists.
Fugitive Thomson, who was born in Dunfermline and also goes by the name Sherry Zimmer, reportedly tied a child who was having seizures to a chair and threw a spear at social workers.
Previously cleared of child abuse on a technicality, she is now wanted by police on two warrants for assaulting officers.
She was uncovered by child welfare organisation the Preda Foundation, which has its base just a few hundred metres from where she supposedly ran a SCOTS Foundation home for abandoned children in Subic Bay.
After children were rescued from Thomson’s home in 2014, Father Shay Cullen, the Irish missionary priest who started the Preda Foundation, said: “I saw non-Filipino elderly men holding and touching children.
“I contacted the government welfare department and learned that the SCOTS Foundation had been disavowed by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).”
Mr Cullen said a naked girl and two skinny, semi-naked girls turned up at the Preda home one day, saying they were from the SCOTS Foundation. He sent a Preda social worker to take a look.
He said: “Zimmer was smoking, unwashed and she appeared drunk. A seven-year-old was caring for a naked six-month-old baby. Another girl, about six, was tied in a chair with plastic binders. She was having epilepsy seizures.”
He said he reported the situation to the DSWD but, two weeks later, the children were still living in miserable conditions. “I called again for the officials to rescue them and then two government social workers and seven police from Subic town went to Zimmer’s house to rescue the children.
“They were prevented from entering the house and allegedly Zimmer hurled invective at them and threatened to kill them if they entered.”