By Tony Winterburn • Published: 26 Feb 2021 • 6:41
Covid Outbreak At Dorset Sex Offender Prison. image: Twitter
Covid Outbreak At Dorset Sex Offender Prison Holding Gary Glitter.
A coronavirus outbreak at the Dorset sex offenders prison where paedophile pop star Gary Glitter’s is serving his sentence has caused the local town’s infection rate to soar to one of the highest in the country.
Underhill and The Grove – a council area on Dorset’s Isle of Portland, which is home to HMP The Verne where the 76-year-old is locked up – recorded 927 cases per 100,000 people last week.
There are only four other areas of England that had bigger outbreaks in the last week of February 20, according to Department of Health data that break the country down into 7,000 postcode-based areas.
In one small area of Dorset, the rate of infection in that one small area is 10 times higher than the rate for the county as a whole. The BBC reported that 120 inmates at the Category C prison have tested positive in the outbreak and that some prison officers are currently self-isolating.
It is not known yet whether Glitter himself is infected. The ex-singer caused outrage earlier this month when he was vaccinated against the virus before prison guards. At 76 the sex offender, real name Paul Gadd, will have been offered a vaccine due to his age.
Glitter was later expelled from Cambodia in 2002 and was convicted in March 2006 of sexually abusing two girls, aged 10 and 11, in Vietnam. He was convicted of attempted rape, four counts of indecent assault, and one of having sex with a girl under the age of 13 and was sentenced to 16 years in prison in February 2015.
The former glam-rock musician was moved to The Verne in Portland in 2018 when the prison became a jail for sex offenders. It is one of a few prisons in the country dedicated to holding those convicted of sexual offences in response to an increase in the number of abusers.
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