Ross Kemp has revealed how the 'worst person' he ever met left him in tears after he interviewed an Indian child trafficker for his documentary series. The encounter took place in 2013 while filming an episode about human traffickers for series three of Ross Kemp: Extreme World.
In his 2023 book, Take Nothing for Granted: Tales from an Unexpected Life, Kemp described meeting a man known as Mr Khan, a trafficker who had purportedly sold girls as young as 12. He wrote: "I've been angry before. But this was different. I sat there and I knew without a doubt that the world would be a better place without this man in it."
Interview with Mr Khan
Kemp said the man who stepped out from the treeline was not what he was expecting. He was "slender" and "young-looking", wearing a baseball cap and rings. Mr Khan started out by convincing girls from the village that he was going to marry them, then took them to the cities, where he would sell them on.
Seven years later, he said he had a network of seventy-five people traffickers working under him. Despite more than twenty-five active investigations against him, he had never been charged with anything. When asked how many girls he had trafficked, he said three or four thousand.
Details of the crimes
Kemp described how Mr Khan claimed the highest price he'd received for a girl was £8,500, but denied ever selling a girl as young as nine. He did, however, admit to selling multiple 12-year-olds. Mr Khan also described how girls who tried to run away or 'were trouble' would be killed and buried in the country, and that he bribed the police to look the other way.
When asked how many girls he had killed, he replied between four and five hundred. Kemp said the man looked at the floor while he spoke, obscuring his face with his cap, and that to him the children were simply "numbers" or "merchandise".
Emotional aftermath
Kemp asked whether he intended to continue killing. He said: "He said, 'If I'm having problems, I'll have to carry on killing.' And he looked sorry for himself and a tear rolled down his cheek. I could just about take everything up until that point, but I couldn't take his self-pity. I told the fixer to get him out of my sight."
Kemp said it was one of the only times he has cut an interview short, and that his translator was left in shock. She cried as she explained what she was being told. "Afterwards, we both sat in tears", Kemp added.
