Man ‘wanted sex with two children’

AFORMER teacher arranged to meet what he thought were children after exchanging sexual messages with them, a court has heard.

When Lyndon Samuel turned up at the rendezvous he was “detained” by so-called paedophile hunters and handed over to the police.

Swansea Crown Court heard the 43-year-old accepts he has a sexual interest in adolescent boys and is willing to address the issue.

Sian Cutter, prosecuting, said in October last year Samuel made contact with a profile on messaging app Kik purporting to be a 14-year-old girl.

The barrister said in reality the account was being run by an adult who was a member of a so-called paedophile hunter group.

The court heard the pair began to chat, but it soon became apparent that the defendant’s “real interest” was in a male schoolfriend called Milo whom the “girl” was talking about and pretending to be spending time with.

During the conversation, Samuel said he wanted to have sex with both the children and sent pictures of his erect penis in jeans. The following day the defendant sent a message apologising for what he had said and justified it by saying he was drunk.

The prosecutor said Samuel then gave the decoy the details of his Snapchat account and those details were passed to a fellow member of the paedophile hunter group who set up a Snapchat account posing as Milo and sent a friend request. Samuel and the “boy” then began to chat on the app.

The prosecutor said the Milo decoy subsequently told the defendant he and a friend called Ben were out and about in the Blaenymaes area of Swansea, and Samuel agreed to meet them.

When he arrived at the rendezvous in his car he was met by members of the paedophile hunter group, who “physically detained him” until police arrived.

Lyndon Samuel, of Cadlewood Road, Portmead, Swansea, had previously pleaded guilty to one count of attempting to engage in sexual communication with a child and two counts of attempting to arrange or facilitating the commission of a child sex offence when he appeared in the dock for sentencing. He has three previous convictions for four offences, with the last being benefit fraud in 2011. None are for sexual offences.

Dean Pulling, for Samuel, said the defendant accepted he had a sexual interest in “young adolescent males” and said the sexual messaging with the decoys had been done in the evenings after he had consumed alcohol.

Judge Catherine Richards said she accepted the defendant’s remorse was genuine and she said he needed “specialist intervention”.

With a one-third discount for his guilty pleas Samuel was sentenced to two years in prison suspended for two years and was ordered to complete a programme requirement and a rehabilitation course and to abide by an alcohol abstinence monitoring requirement.

The defendant will be a registered sex offender for the rest of his life and was made the subject of an indefinite sexual harm prevention order.