Amsterdam’s public prosecutor has charged former crèche worker Robert Mikelsons with sexually abusing 52 boys and 15 girls.

Mr Mikelsons, aged 28, has confessed he abused 87 children but 20 of them have been excluded from the trial at the request of the parents. The public prosecutor refused to honour more requests in order to seek the sentence it deems appropriate for the grave offences of which the defendant stands accused.

To protect the children and their relatives, none will be named. Instead, they have been given a number. The accused has agreed to this procedure.

At today’s hearing, the public prosecutor gave a graphic description of all the sexual acts Mr Mikelsons allegedly inflicted on his victims, some of them toddlers.

Some of them, the prosecution claims, were abused several times, occasionally over long periods of time. The children were abused at the three day-care centres where the defendant used to work, at their homes and, in a few instances, at his own home. Four children were abused by Mr Mikelsons along with another adult man.

Mr Mikelsons is accused of taking nearly 2,000 pictures and 138 videos of one of the abused toddlers. The indictment lists 6,000 pictures and 470 videos. Mr Mikelsons computer is said to have contained 46,775 pictures and 3,672 videos.

The Pieter Baan Centre for forensic psychiatry where Mr Mikelsons was interned for seven weeks has declared him to be in a state of diminished responsibility. In its report, the centre concludes he is a hypersexual paedophile who is highly likely to commit repeat offences. The centre urges the court to commit him to a psychiatric detention centre.

The lawyer who represents Mr Mikelsons has questioned the report’s conclusions on the grounds that his client refused to cooperate with the forensic study.

(cl)

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