'He couldn't remember how many children he had molested in the last two years!'

Vithanage Yasapala was considered a model citizen in Halthota, a small town in Sri Lanka, where everybody knows everybody else.

Pleasant, always smiling, the 35-year-old lived with his wife and one-year-old daughter in this town of 2,000, 55 kilometres southeast of Colombo, the country's capital.

Yasapal had been a Buddhist monk for 20 years, but gave up his robes to become a full-time teacher to the 70 students of Halthota Elementary School. Last year, he was appointed its principal.

But since last week, the town has been reeling with shame and anger after police arrested Yasapala for sexually abusing eight of the boys and girls in his fourth grade class.

"He was a good principal and a very nice person. He'd been a priest too. The whole town trusted him,'' said a victim's mother.

Yasapala's is the second incident of this sort in Sri Lanka. Last August, a music teacher in Galle was charged with supplying 14 of his teenage students to foreigners, some of whom videotaped their orgies.

The Yasapala case is bound to raise the notoriety of this Indian ocean island as a sexual haven. It has nearly 30,000 boy prostitutes wandering its sandy beaches.

However, instances of child molestation by Sri Lankans have been rare. Yasapala's case is even more disturbing because of its link with the Buddhist clergy, which has wide political and moral authority here.

The scandal broke on June 15, when a nine-year-old girl told parents that her principal was a 'very nice man' who kissed and cuddled her and others all the time. When her curious parents asked for details, she told them he even took their clothes off and fondled them, and sometimes disrobed and asked them to touch his genitals, said Halthota Chief Inspector Kavan Karunatilleke.

The astounded parents contacted other parents, and eight children corroborated the story. Within hours, the town's model principal became every parent's nightmare. But the parents were too ashamed to report the matter to the police.

Hoping to avoid publicity, they contacted the department of education and asked the principal be transferred. Instead, two education department inspectors confronted Yasapala, who fled town with his family.

The next day, the police detained him at Kalutara, 16 kms away, where he had rented a house under a false name.

Yasapala confessed after doctors confirmed three of the eight children whose parents had come forward had been sodomised. "He couldn't remember how many children he had molested in the last two years!" said Karunatilleke, "But he confessed he had molested the eight. We will nail him."

A court ordered Yasapala held until June 30.

Yasapala told police that he was sexually abused for years by the head priest of a Buddhist temple in central Sri Lanka where his parents had sent him when he was 13.

The police plan to charge Yasapala with at least three counts of sodomy and child rape, which is punishable by 10 to 20 years imprisonment, and five counts of sexual assault, which carries a minimum of two years.

The school's three female teachers never suspected that Yasapala, the only man on the staff, was a child-molester.

"He was the nicest person you could find,'' said one. "He never even used swear words!''

UNI