Monster monk

Extradited teacher, 85, is jailed for 4½ years over ‘shameful’ historic abuse...but may walk free soon

A PERVERT has been jailed after sexually abusing two pupils at a Scottish private school more than four decades ago.

Former Benedictine monk Denis Alexander preyed on the children while working as a history teacher at Fort Augustus Abbey school in the 1970s.

The 85-year-old attacked the boys during yoga classes and at his study in the Inverness-shire institution. He later moved to Australia but was returned to face justice.

Jailing him for four years and five months at the High Court in Edinburgh yesterday, judge Lord Burns said: ‘You have brought lasting shame on the Order of which you were a member... These vulnerable young boys were entrusted to your care and what you did was a gross abuse of the trust placed in you as a teacher.’

Lord Burns backdated the sentence to January 23 2017. Alexander has been in custody since then. He will be deported on his release.

The pervert had left Scotland to become a priest in Sydney, where he initially contested a bid to extradite him launched in 2016.

Efforts to bring him to justice came after a BBC documentary called Sins of Our Fathers was shown in 2013.

Alexander was returned to Scotland last year, almost three years after an extradition request was first sent. He admitted two charges of indecent behaviour against the boys at the High Court last month after being brought into the building in a wheelchair.

Advocate depute Jane Farquharson, QC, told the court: ‘These offences are a snapshot of what is believed to be wider systemic abuse of children at Fort Augustus Abbey School and its preparatory school Carlekemp, also run by the Benedictine Order.’

The school was a subject of the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry in 2019 and the English Benedictine Congregation accepted that physical and sexual abuse took place.

Shame: 85-year-old Alexander was sentenced yesterday at the High Court in Edinburgh

An apology was tendered. His first victim, now 60, was around 13 when Alexander, then in his late 30s, summoned him to his study and molested him between September 1973 and June 1974.

The second victim, now 58, was subjected to abuse after the monk asked him to join a yoga group at the monastery. He was aged around 12 to 13 at the time of the

‘Gross abuse of trust’

abuse in the mid 1970s. He told the headteacher, but the police did not become involved.

Defence solicitor advocate Shahid Latif said: ‘He is sorry and he can do no more than he has done and that is to have pled guilty.’

Alexander watched the sentencing via a video link. He was placed on the sex offenders register.

Helen Holland of In Care Abuse Survivors said: ‘Four-and-a-half years for destroying lives is nothing for someone who deliberately did not cooperate with the justice system for years.’