Last Updated: Thursday, January 20, 2011 | 12:55 PM CST
CBC News
A Roman Catholic priest accused of sex crimes against children in Nunavut has arrived in Iqualuit following a stopover in Montreal from Belgium.
Rev. Eric Dejaeger, 63, who is a Canadian citizen, arrived on a commercial flight at 1 p.m. ET Thursday.
RCMP officers accompanied him from the plane into a police truck that took him to the local courthouse for a hearing, the CBC’s Chris Harbord reports.
Dejaeger was put on Interpol’s list of wanted fugitives when the Nunavut Court of Justice issued an arrest warrant in 2002 on six charges involving children in Igloolik, a remote Inuit community in the territory.
Dejaeger faces three counts of indecent assault on a male and three counts of buggery, in relation to alleged incidents between 1978 and 1982 in Igloolik, where he had served as a missionary.
He pleaded guilty in 1990 to nine counts of sex crimes against boys and girls in Baker Lake, another community in Nunavut, and was sentenced to five years in prison.
But by the time the Igloolik charges were issued in 2002, Dejaeger was living freely in Belgium, his country of birth.
According to Belgian media, Dejaeger was living in an Oblate monastery and worked in the Catholic pilgrimage site of Lourdes, France, where he received Flemish pilgrims.
Belgian authorities detained Dejaeger earlier this month for overstaying his legal residency in that country. According to government officials there, the priest gave up his Belgian citizenship when he became a Canadian citizen in 1977.
Dejaeger was put on a plane from Brussels to Montreal on Wednesday.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2011/01/20/canada-dejaeger-nunavut.html#ixzz1BbUPKZNW