Christopher Paul Neil (born February 6 1975 in New Westminster, Canada[1]) is a suspect in an Interpol investigation of the sexual abuse of at least 12 young boys in Vietnam and Cambodia and has allegedly been arrested by Thai police.[2] Neil, a Canadian national, allegedly appeared in over 200 photographs depicting the abuse, which surfaced on the internet and led to a worldwide manhunt known as Operation Vico. The face of the abuser was obscured by a digital swirl in the photographs, but German computer experts at the Federal Criminal Police Office were able to reconstruct the original picture, using techniques which they have not revealed but are believed to have been as simple as running the transformation in reverse.[3]
Several of these reconstructed pictures were posted on Interpol's website and led to over 350 people contacting the organization, five of whom identified the man as Neil. Neil was working as an English teacher in South Korea, but had traveled to Thailand at the time of his identification. He was arrested in Nakhon Ratchasima, in the Isan region of northeast Thailand, on October 19, 2007. [4]
Reverse swirl transformation
The "swirl" operation is in theory non-lossy. In practice both resolution and colour depth limitations in a digital image make the operation "not very lossy" and reversible by applying the same operation with opposite rotational direction and the same intensity.