A 25-year-old Nigerian international student has been sentenced to three years in prison after being caught trying to meet a child for sex in the North East of England.
Anderson Ishiekwene arrived in the United Kingdom on a student visa in August 2025 and lived in Sunderland. Within months he began an online conversation with what he believed was a 14-year-old girl. The profile was in fact a decoy operated by the paedophile-hunter group Guardians of the North.
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Court documents and reporting from Newcastle Crown Court show that Ishiekwene messaged the profile on Facebook on 2 January 2026 before moving the exchange to WhatsApp. He was told multiple times that the person he was speaking to was 14.
Nevertheless he asked about her school and school uniform, asked intimate questions about her body, requested photographs, and sent an image of his own naked groin area.
According to the BBC, when she refused to send him pictures, he would say it was “unfair” and told her it was a “normal thing for people to do in a relationship”, Coke Cockburn, the prosecutor, said.
To clean tracks, throughout the exchange he repeatedly urged her to delete his messages.
They arranged to meet on 10 January at the Galleries shopping centre in Washington.
Ishiekwene said he wanted to kiss and sexually touch her “like lovers.” When he stepped off the bus he was met by members of the hunter group and arrested by police. More than 300 pages of messages were recovered.
Ishiekwene admitted the offence of attempting to engage in sexual communications with a child. He denied that the planned meeting was sexual in nature, but a jury convicted him of attempting to meet a child following sexual grooming after a three-day trial.
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Sentencing him, Judge Robert Spragg said the activity planned for that day was a “precursor” to an intention for full sexual intercourse on a future occasion. The probation service had concluded there was “little doubt” the defendant was attracted to children.
In addition to the three-year prison term, Ishiekwene was ordered to sign the sex offenders register and to obey a sexual harm prevention order indefinitely. Upon release he is expected to face automatic deportation to Nigeria.
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