- Saturday, May 04, 2024
Matthew Smith paid two Indian boys £65,398 to abuse children while he was working in Nepal
By: Chandrashekar Bhat
A FORMER deputy head teacher at a prominent London school previously attended by royals has pleaded guilty to financially rewarding Indian teenagers for sending him indecent images of children.
Matthew Smith, 34, from East Dulwich, admitted to 22 charges, including having instructed teenagers in India online to abuse younger children while he was working in Nepal.
The “prolific offender” who appeared at Southwark Crown Court on Tuesday (20) will be sentenced on August 4.
Smith, who briefly worked at the £20,000-a-year Thomas’s Battersea school in London where Prince George and Princess Charlotte once studied, was arrested in November last year after investigators discovered that he had been sharing abuse material on the dark web during his stay in Nepal.
He was online at the time of his arrest, speaking to a boy living in India and asking him to send sexual images of a younger child, in return for money, the National Crime Agency said.
Officers recovered more than 120,000 indecent images of children which the Oxford University graduate had saved on a laptop, SD card and on his phone.
Smith was remanded in custody, charged with five offences, including causing the sexual exploitation of a child under 13.
Investigators established that Smith had paid the boy and another teenager, also based in India, £65,398 to abuse children over five years.
He worked in orphanages and non-governmental organisations across India between 2007-2014 before he shifted to Nepal where taught at Kathmandu’s British School.
He returned to London in July 2022 and started working at Thomas’s Battersea where he was a deputy head teacher and head of pastoral care before he was fired two months later.
Investigators found that Smith would instruct the young men via chat logs to perform sexual acts on boys and would send them images and videos as examples of ones he would like to receive in return.
He also told one of them how to befriend children and build their trust with a view to abuse them, the NCA said.
Information and evidence of potential offending by Smith against children while working in India have been shared with relevant law enforcement partners.
However, there is no evidence to suggest he committed offences against children based in Nepal or Britain.
Claire Brinton, a specialist in the Organised Child Sexual Abuse Unit of the Crown Prosecution Service said Smith’s crimes were “particularly disturbing” given his role as a primary school teacher.
“Thousands of images and videos were recovered from his devices which showed an appalling catalogue of sexual abuse being perpetrated on children,” she said.
A Thomas’s Battersea spokesperson said the school was “shocked and appalled beyond measure” by Smith’s actions and thanked the investigators for bringing him to justice.
His employment at the school, which began in September 2022, was terminated soon after it learned of the charges against him in November, the spokesperson said.
