The Australian woman who set gardai on an international wild goose chase last year after she posed as a teenage sex-trafficking victim has turned up in Canada making similar false claims.

Samantha Azzopardi (25) is understood to be facing her second deportation in a year after she told Canadian police she was held prisoner for two weeks and sexually assaulted.

Police in Calgary today confirmed they had been in touch with gardai and had positively identified the woman as Ms Azzopardi.

The young woman told Calgary police her name was Aurora Hepburn and claimed she had been sexually assaulted while being held at a children’s hospital. She also claimed she had been imprisoned in a cage. It is understood she had filed a missing person report about herself to police in Canada using the false identity.

However, Calgary police contacted gardai last Thursday and were able to establish they were dealing with the same person.

Ms Azzopardi became known as the ‘GPO Girl’ after she was found apparently wandering and bewildered by gardai in O’Connell Street in October last year.

Expand Close The girl was found in a distressed state near the GPO / Facebook

Twitter

Email

Whatsapp The girl was found in a distressed state near the GPO

She was taken into protective custody and kept under armed guard in Temple Street Hospital after she apparently convinced gardai she was a teenage sex trafficking victim from eastern Europe.

She spoke no English during the two weeks she was under protection and made childish drawings that suggested some form of sexual abuse had taken place.

Gardai were forbidden from publishing any image of her under child law guidelines for two weeks.

However, days after convincing the High Court they should do so, they were contacted by relatives of Ms Azzopardi.

It later emerged she had convictions in 2010 in Brisbane on charges of making false representations and possession of forged documents. She was fined AUS$500 and given a suspended sentence. She also had previous convictions for fraud in Perth.

After her true identity was established, gardai discovered Ms Azzopardi had no fewer than 40 previous aliases.

It also emerged she had visited a friend of her mother’s in Clonmel, Co Tipperary, when she arrived in Ireland in September last year.

Ms Azzopardi had left Clonmel indicating she was returning to Australia.

It is believed she travelled to Dublin and assumed the persona of an underage Eastern European girl who had escaped from sex traffickers and was in need of protection.

She was sufficiently convincing to the point gardai set up a major operation that involved round-the-clock armed hospital guard, and an international search involving Interpol seeking a missing girl of Eastern European origin thought to be aged 14 or 15. The garda operation consumed 2,000 working hours and 115 different lines of international inquiry were pursued. The operation cost hundreds of thousands of euros.

After her identity was established and it was determined there was no threat to her, and she was also no threat to herself, Ms Azzopardi was sent back to Australia last November.

However, it subsequently emerged she returned to Ireland in May this year, using another alias and worked as an au pair for a family in Co Leitrim for six weeks before her real identity was discovered.

Ms Azzopardi left the country again, but it was not clear how or when she travelled to Canada.

A spokesman for Calgary Police tonight confirmed the young woman they are investigating is the same person that made similar claims in Ireland.

He said: “The same person who was dealt with by Irish police was dealt with here.”

The police said they are withholding further details.

Online Editors