The Associated Press
UNION CITY, N.J. — Police detained a suspected pedophile in New Jersey yesterday, just two days after Interpol made a rare appeal for public help in the international manhunt to catch him.
Wayne Nelson Corliss, 58, was detained in Union City, N.J., Interpol said. He is suspected of sexually abusing at least three boys from Southeast Asia thought to have been as young as 6 to 10 years old at the time, the international police agency said.
Interpol had asked for the public’s help because two years of police investigations had failed to determine the man’s identity, nationality and whereabouts.
The agency’s head, Ronald Noble, called the appeal an “extraordinary success” and said such calls for public help could in the future be expanded from child sex offenders to “seriously wanted international criminals.”
Interpol said images of Corliss allegedly abusing children had circulated on the Internet. He was detained after Interpol’s appeal drew nearly 250,000 visits in just 24 hours to the agency’s Web site.
“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” said the Interpol secretary-general. Without the Internet, the suspect “wouldn’t have been able to circulate his sexual abuse on the Internet. But if it hadn’t been for the Internet, we wouldn’t have been able to catch this guy.”