A 21-year-old Edmonton man has been charged with a number of sexual assault and child pornography offences after the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams (ALERT) alleges he lured at least six children into performing sexual acts.
In a news release Wednesday morning, ALERT said an investigation by its Internet Child Exploitation (ICE) unit, which began in June, identified at least six victims of child luring and sexual assault.
Sgt. Kerry Shima, operations NCO for the northern Alberta ICU unit, said the alleged offences occurred between September 2021 and June of this year. The victims were aged 11 to 13 at the time, Shima said.
“Any instance where we’re dealing with an 11 year old who has been offended against by a stranger is extremely scary and highly concerning for parents and police alike,” he said.
ALERT alleges the man targeted the young girls through Snapchat, and in some cases gained access to the victim’s contacts through extortion.
“Child luring occurs when certain predators misrepresent themselves purposely as someone who is of pure age to these kids in order to gain their trust or to fain mutual connection to exploit them — obtain photos, videos and in this case, we believe it was in fact to meet and commit sexual assaults,” Shima said.
“In a general sense, a lot of these predators will get involved with a friend group and spider out to other associates or contacts.
“Through my experience working in this unit, I have come to understand that in the teenage youth culture, a lot of kids are adding people to their own Snapchat friends list without actually knowing who they are.”
Shima said while it’s believed the accused met in person with all six victims, he has not been charged with sexual assault on all of the victims. However, police allege he had criminal involvement with all of the victims in some degree.
ALERT said the series of child luring instances allegedly took place in the Morinville and Edmonton areas.
“We don’t have any information right now to believe that he has any personal connection to that town (Morinville), which makes this that much more, I guess, scary,” Shima said.
Morinville RCMP and the Zebra Child Protection Centre were involved in the investigation, which began following a public tip to the Morinville detachment, Shima said.
ALERT said Imesh Ratnayake was arrested on July 7. He is charged with sexual assault, sexual interference, luring a child, making child pornography, transmitting child pornography, possessing child pornography, obtaining sexual service for consideration from persons under 18, invitation to sexual touching, distribution of intimate images and extortion.
Ratnayake was released from custody and is scheduled to appear in court in Morinville on Aug. 4. Shima said Ratnayake resides in Edmonton and was released on conditions.
“The justice system has its way of dealing with things. Is it a concern to us? Yeah. It’s a concern that he’s out on bail. I don’t know the rationale for the release. We’re out here talking about other potential victims. The justice system has put in place conditions, which we trust, but is it a concern? Yeah,” Shima said.
Some of the conditions of Ratnayake’s release include having no communication with the victims, residing in a residence approved by the court, not having any contact or communication with anyone under the age of 16, not possessing or using any electronic device capable of accessing the internet and not accessing social media.
ALERT said investigators have reason to believe there are more victims, and for that reason they are releasing a picture of the suspect and his vehicle — a 2011 Avura CSX, which ALERT alleges was used in some of the offences.
Ratnayake would be known on Snapchat as “islandsauce0129” or “monked.ruffy,” according to ALERT.
Shima said when the investigation began, investigators had no other information to go off of but the Snapchat usernames.
“We didn’t have any information about him otherwise. So that’s very concerning for us when somebody’s out and about, we don’t know who he is, we don’t know where he’s from or what he’s doing. And we work with some partners to get that information,” he explained.
“We tapped into our international partnerships and were assisted by them in identifying the accounts and we have some other investigative techniques that we use once we have certain pieces of information from these platforms.”
Protecting your kids online
Shima said there are a few things parents can do to help protect their kids online. The first being ensuring their kids have a place to go or someone they trust to talk to if something happens.
“The biggest thing is making sure your kids are confident and trust you,” he said.
“If kids feel that they don’t have a parent’s trust to the depth of something so intimate as a sexual assault, then they may not report it to those parents and parents might be shocked one day to find something terrible has happened to their kids on their devices.
“We need to get down to our kid’s level, and sometimes it’s going up to their level. Getting down to their level, speaking their language and speaking a language they understand. Also coming up to their level where they can teach us about these platforms.”
Shima said he has teenage kids himself and had them teach him about different social media platforms. He also encourages parents to educate themselves on the different platforms their kids are using.
“Every single one of these platforms has parent guides on the internet. They’re easy to read, lots of info graphs — they speak grownup, they speak Gen X — so it’s easy for parents to understand them.”
He also said parents can look for changes in their kids’ behaviour, and not be afraid to have open and frank conversations with their kids about sexual assault, consent, child luring and strangers on the internet.
“Have those conversations. And in this case here, it might be an open question about, ‘Are you having any relationships online or do you have any friends in your Snapchat friends list or your Instagram account who you don’t know? Is there anyone asking you for nudes? Is there anyone complimenting you unusually? Is there anyone offering you something for sex? Is there anyone offering you something for photos?’ Those are the types of questions that we need to be asking our kids.”
According to the provincial courts, Ratnayake did not have a criminal record prior to this incident.
Anyone with information about the suspect or the investigation is asked to contact ICE at 780-509-3363. Anonymous information can be submitted to Crime Stoppers.