Australian guilty of luring 13-year-old to be deported

An Australian man will be deported and placed on Canada’s national sexual offenders registry for the next 20 years after being sentenced Tuesday on a child luring charge.

Jiashu Weng, 22, flew from Sydney to Edmonton in February last year, accompanied by his mother, with the intention of meeting and having sex with a 13-year-old girl he met online.

The pair’s first contact in October 2016 was through a mobile game called Girls X Battle, but their conversations moved to Skype where they spoke about video-gaming, and exchanged family photographs and personal information.

According to an agreed statement of facts, the girl sent Weng explicit photos and several chat logs show Weng’s desire to have sex with the girl.

The university student arranged to meet the girl at a hotel in the city’s north side on Feb. 10, 2017, and the girl had asked her mother for a weekend sleepover at a friend’s home. That request prompted her mother to search the girl’s phone where she found the offending messages.

The mother alerted police, who arrested Weng when he arrived at the hotel.

During sentencing proceedings, Crown prosecutor Craig Krieger conceded the likelihood of Weng and the girl having sex was “extremely slim” because he was sharing a small hotel room with his mother, who was described as being extremely protective and coddling.

Weng told police he had no intention of having sex with the girl and simply wanted to meet a person he considered a friend, Krieger told the court, a fact the Crown accepted as “probably true.”

Krieger said unlike many luring cases in which predators create fake social media accounts to manipulate and groom their victims into sending explicit images, Weng was open and honest about his age and had “sincere feelings” for the girl.

He said most of the dialogue between the pair was “inconsequential” and “ordinary chit chat” and only on several occasions did the topic of sex come up.

An aggravating factor, however, was that Weng put a lot of effort into travelling more than 20 hours by plane to Canada, a trip that cost his mother several thousand dollars.

Defence attorney Rory Ziv painted Weng as an immature young man who lacked a father figure and had an overbearing mother.

Weng apologized to the victim’s family and his own family, whom he said he had disgraced, in a statement read to the court by his lawyer.

Sitting in the prisoner’s dock wearing a black suit, black shirt and black-rimmed glasses, Weng quietly wept, as did his mother.

Justice Paul Belzil handed Weng a one-year sentence, but as a result of a de-facto house arrest in a hotel room since he was first charged, Weng had no time left to serve.

Weng was also ordered to supply a DNA sample for a national database and he must forfeit the smartphone used in conversations with the girl.

He was also ordered to pay a $200 victim surcharge.