A Nigerian student has been sentenced to three years in prison by a UK court and now faces automatic deportation after he was caught attempting to meet a person he believed was a 14-year-old girl for sex.
Anderson Ishiekwene, 25, was arrested in Washington, Tyne and Wear, after arranging to meet who he thought was a teenage girl.
The “girl,” however, was a decoy profile run by an online paedophile-hunting group.
Ishiekwene arrived in the UK from Nigeria in August 2025 on a student visa and had settled in Sunderland.
According to prosecutors at Newcastle Crown Court yesterday, he began messaging the decoy account on Facebook on January 2, before shifting the conversation to WhatsApp.
Over the following eight days, the exchange grew to more than 300 pages of messages this despite the decoy repeatedly telling him “she” was 14 years old.
The court heard that Ishiekwene asked intrusive questions about the “girl’s” school and appearance, requested explicit images, and sent a sexual photograph of himself.
He also repeatedly urged her to delete their conversation. When she declined to send photos of herself, he complained that this was “unfair,” insisting that exchanging such images was “a normal thing for people to do in a relationship.”
The two arranged to meet on January 10 at the Galleries shopping centre in Washington. Prosecutors said Ishiekwene told the “girl” he wanted to kiss and sexually touch her “like lovers.” When he arrived at the location, he was confronted by members of the paedophile-hunting group before police moved in and arrested him.
Ishiekwene denied that he had travelled there for a sexual purpose, but following a three-day trial, a jury convicted him of attempting to meet a child following sexual grooming. He had already pleaded guilty to a separate charge of attempting to engage in sexual communication with a child.
Handing down sentence, Judge Robert Spragg said the sexual contact Ishiekwene had planned for January 10 appeared to be a “precursor” to full intercourse at a later date.
The judge noted that the probation service found “little doubt” Ishiekwene was sexually attracted to children.
Alongside the three-year custodial sentence, the court ordered him to register as a sex offender and comply indefinitely with a Sexual Harm Prevention Order. Judge Spragg indicated that Ishiekwene will most likely be deported from the UK automatically once his sentence is served.