School assistant sent to jail over indecent pictures of children

Published on Monday 5 July 2010 17:46

A PRIMARY school assistant caught with thousands of indecent images of children, including a four-year-old girl in his care, was jailed for seven years and ten months yesterday.

Syd Beg, 54, denied he was sexually interested in children and said he had amassed the collection "out of curiosity". But a judge said it was hard to reconcile his claims with the evidence.

Lord Hardie pointed to a "disturbing" feature of Beg's behaviour, in which he put the names of pupils of the school where he worked on to images of vile abuse downloaded from the internet.

"You abused a position of trust as an employee of Glasgow City Council education department … you gained access to pre-school and primary schoolchildren and information about their identities and used it for your own deviant purposes," the judge said.

One of Beg's duties had been to escort youngsters on taxi journeys, and during a trip he used his mobile phone to take photographs and a video up the skirt of a four-year-old girl.

"She was attending a centre for children with learning difficulties and was in your care to ensure she got there and back safely," Lord Hardie told Beg.

The High Court in Edinburgh heard that Beg, of Glenavon Road, Glasgow, was a first offender who had worked with children for more than 20 years, and had been a classroom assistant at a primary school in Glasgow since 2001.

He admitted collecting about 21,500 images between 2000 and his arrest in January this year, and using lewd behaviour towards the girl in the taxi on 11 June last year.

Police had identified Beg during a wider investigation into internet crime, and raided his home. Officers recovered computer equipment and tests revealed the images, which included the worst categories of child sexual abuse. The file names of several of the images had been altered and Beg had substituted his name and those of pupils in descriptions of the abuse.

Also, Beg had stored eight stills and video images of the girl in the taxi. Those were listed in the least indecent category.

The wallpaper of the computer was a pupil of Beg's school wearing her school uniform, and more than 37,500 non- indecent images of children from the school or known to Beg were in his flat, along with children's hair ties and bobbles. Photographs of his four "favourite" children were on his bedside table. He had been the school's "unofficial photographer".

Beg told police he felt "fatherly love" for the children and said the girl in the taxi had not been harmed, but added: "I shouldn't have done that."

He was sacked after his arrest. A police inquiry and a parents' helpline at the school revealed no other offending by Beg. He was described as "a loner" but also being "like the pied piper" in relation to children.

David Taylor, the defence solicitor-advocate, said: "[Beg] maintains that, however shameful these matters were and however much he regrets becoming involved, he was not gaining sexual satisfaction [and] he simply did it out of curiosity."

Lord Hardie said that although Beg had not been involved in the production of the worst kind of images, and there had been no distribution by him to others, the period over which he had built up the collection and its size were relevant to sentencing, along with the breach of trust.

The judge said the changing of the names was a disturbing feature, adding: "In my view, it is hard to reconcile that with your claim you did not have any sexual fantasies about children."

Beg was ordered to be supervised for five years at the end of his jail sentence.