Australian teacher jailed for paedophilia in Indonesia

JAKARTA: An Indonesian court convicted an Australian man of paedophilia on Monday and jailed him for 10 years for having sex with more than 50 teenage boys.

The court also ordered Peter Smith, 48, to pay a fine of 75 million rupiah ($8,255) or face an extra three months in jail.

The judge said the defendant had admitted, and witnesses had confirmed, that Smith had lured children as young as 14 to his home and performed sex acts on them.

Smith recorded some of the encounters on video.

Smith, an English teacher who also holds a British passport, was arrested in his rented house in Jakarta in August last year after police received reports from two children.

The children said they were paid 40,000 rupiah (just over four dollars) each time Smith had sex with them and an additional 10,000 rupiah if he videotaped them.

Indonesia, particularly the resort islands of Bali and Lombok, is increasingly being used as a haven by foreign paedophiles and child sex networks.

A former Australian diplomat hanged himself in his cell in 2004 after he was jailed for 13 years on child sex offences.