US prosecutors have revealed details of their 31-year international hunt for the film director Roman Polanski including failed attempts to arrest him in the UK, Canada, Thailand, and Israel, before he was eventually seized in Switzerland over the weekend.
Following criticism about the timing of the arrest, the Los Angles county district attorney’s office issued a detailed chronology of its efforts bring Polanski to justice after his admission of sex with an underage girl.
It first attempted to get Polanski extradited from the UK in May 1978 after learning that he may have been in England at the time. Similar moves were made in Canada in 1986, France in 1994, and Thailand in 2005. Polanski was also close to being arrested in Israel in July 2007, but a delay over paperwork requested by the Israelis, meant he left before the arrest could be made.
In July lawyers for the Oscar-winning director claimed that the US authorities had not tried to arrest him for fear of drawing attention to their own misconduct.
Amid a growing diplomatic row over the arrest, the prosecutors gave details of the contacts it had with several countries in its attempts to arrest Polanski.
The director pleaded guilty in 1977 to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl while photographing her during a modelling session. He was sent to prison for 42 days but then the judge tried to renege on the plea bargain. On the day of his sentencing in 1978, aware the judge would sentence him to more prison time, Polanski fled to France.
Polanski has been the subject of an Interpol ”red notice” for years, said chief inspector Thomas Hession of the US Marshals Service, which has a LA-based team that requested the Polanski arrest warrant last week.
It states that Polanski is wanted for a specific crime, and that the US is willing to seek his extradition.
Jean Rosenbluth, a University of Southern California law professor and a former federal prosecutor, said Polanski’s allegations ”probably brought him back on to the prosecutor’s radar screen”.
”Prosecutors are people too,” she said. ”If you thumb your nose at them, they might thumb their nose back.”
Polanski’s agent, Jeff Berg, said he was aware of no efforts to arrest the director before Saturday. The timing of the director’s arrest ”certainly appears unusual”, Berg said, especially since Polanski spent the summer at his house in Switzerland.
Hession said Polanski’s arrest came now because authorities had the advance knowledge and the opportunity. ”The idea that we have known where he is and we could have gotten him anytime, that just isn’t the case,” he said.
France and Poland urged Switzerland to free the 76-year-old director on bail and said they would be lobbying the US government all the way up to the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
Frédéric Mitterrand, the French culture minister, said the arrest was proof of the ”frightening” side of America.
”In the same way as there is a generous America which we love, there is also a certain kind of America which is frightening, and it is this America which has now shown us its face,” he said.
Despite being held in Swiss custody for two nights, Polanski remains ”totally combative and determined to defend himself”, one of his French lawyers said.
Polanski, the director of Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby, had travelled to Switzerland to accept an award at the Zurich film festival. The event’s organisers expressed ”great consternation and shock” at his detention.
He has hired the Swiss lawyer Lorenz Erni, of the Eschmann & Erni firm, to fight any extradition charges.
The Oscar-winning director Andrzej Wajda and other Polish filmmakers have appealed to the US, Swiss and Polish authorities for the Paris-born Polanski to be freed.
Polanski has strong links with Poland, having moved to the country with his Jewish family as a child shortly before World War II.
His mother died in a Nazi concentration camp but he avoided capture and spent his youth in Poland before moving to the west.
The director has held French citizenship for many years and is married to the French singer and actor Emmanuelle Seigner. He has spent much of his life in France since fleeing the US in 1978 but regularly visits countries that do not have extradition treaties with the US.
The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, wants to see the director reunited swiftly with his family, Mitterrand said. – guardian.co.uk