Schoolboy took own life in nude photo blackmail
Gifted student revealed video plan to kill himself after Snapchat demand for £100 to withhold images
‘Dinal had had some girlfriends, he’d been very open with me – I’d warned him to be careful’
A PRIVATE school pupil killed himself after he was blackmailed on Snapchat over nude photographs.
Dinal De Alwis, 16, represented Whitgift School at rugby and football and hoped to study economics at Cambridge University after achieving straight A* in all his GCSE subjects.
Dinal killed himself in October 2022 just days after he returned from a family holiday in Majorca over the autumn half-term break. He left his home at 2am and was seen on CCTV falling to his death an hour later.
South London Coroner’s Court heard that the teenager recorded a video outlining plans to kill himself after he received two nude photographs of himself from a blackmailer on social media.
The blackmailer demanded that Dinal pay £100 to stop sending the images to his followers.
Dinal’s family say they believe a girl may have taken the images with the teenager before they ended up in the wrong hands.
An inquest into Dinal’s death heard that the blackmailer, who is understood to have targeted other victims, wrote: “So you think blocking me can stop me? What do you want me to do – you want me to send it to all of your followers? Why can’t you just pay me? £100?”
The inquest heard that a Met Police investigation found in the hours before his death, Dinal had received messages from a man who was using a virtual private network to mask his location, but detectives believe he was “probably based in Nigeria”.
Dinal’s father Kaushallya De Alwis told the inquest his son had not shown any signs of unhappiness but believes he wanted to avoid the shame of the photographs going public.
He told the court how he was proud his son was proficient in English after the family moved from Sri Lanka and described him as brave and caring. Dinal had played football and rugby at Whitgift School, where the England rugby players Danny Cipriani and Elliot Daly are among the sporting alumni. He achieved straight A* grades in his GCSES.
Talking about his death, Mr De Alwis said the fact his son had taken his own life after he was blackmailed was “incredibly painful” and showed “the world is so cruel”.
The inquest ruled that Dinal died as a result of suicide.
Speaking to the Daily Mail on Sunday night, Mr De Alwis said he did not want other families to experience similar tragedies and called for parents to be allowed access to their children’s social media accounts.
He told the newspaper: “Dinal had had some girlfriends, he’d been very open with me – I’d warned him to be careful. The grieving is never-ending.
“I’m very worried about my younger son – he’s big-time into all this social media, and young people underestimate the dangers around them.
“There must be ways of tracking these things and parents should have access.”
A Snapchat spokesman said: “Any sexual exploitation of young people is abhorrent and our hearts go out to the family and friends of the victim. We work in multiple ways to detect and prevent this type of abuse and work with police to support investigations.
“We have extra protections for under-18s including a special reporting category if someone is threatening to share sexual content.” The app has a pop-up warning for users if they are added by someone they do not know.
Police did not establish exactly how the suspect managed to get hold of the photographs.
The National Crime Agency and the Metropolitan Police have been approached for comment.