UK teacher pleads guilty to online sex abuse of Indian children

London, June 22

A former deputy head teacher of a primary school in London has pleaded guilty to paying and instructing teenagers in India, where he worked for seven years, to send him over 120,000 indecent images of young children.

Matthew Smith, 34, from East Dulwich, was charged on Tuesday with five offences, including causing the sexual exploitation of a child under 13, and remanded in custody, the National Crime Agency (NCA) said.

Smith, who will be sentenced at the Southwark Crown Court on August 4, was arrested in November 2022, after investigations identified that he was sharing abuse material on the dark web.

According to NCA, he was online at the time of his arrest, speaking to a teenage boy living in India and asking him to send sexual images of a younger child, in return for money. He also had dark web sites and forums open on his computer which were dedicated to child sexual abuse.

NCA investigators interrogated chat logs and financial transactions and were able to establish that Smith had paid that same teenager, and another also based in India, GBP 65,398 to abuse children over a five-year period.

Officers recovered over 120,000 indecent images of children, which Smith had saved on a laptop, SD card and on his phone.

“Thousands of images and videos were recovered from his devices which showed an appalling catalogue of sexual abuse being perpetrated on children. Smith offered individuals payments for indecent images to gratify his own sexual desires, which resulted in the horrifying abuse of young children in India,” Claire Brinton, Specialist Prosecutor in the Crown Prosecution Service Organised Child Sexual Abuse Unit, said.

Smith was living in Nepal and working at a school for the majority of this time. Prior to this, he spent various periods working in orphanages and NGOs across India from 2007-2014.

He moved back to the UK in July 2022 and began working at the primary school in London in September, where he was a deputy head teacher and head of pastoral care.