“Malicious” child porn caretaker gets 12 years

Neil Weiner Photo: Central News

Assistant school caretaker Neil Weiner has been sentenced to 12 years in jail after being found guilty of possessing indecent images of children and perverting the course of justice by planting  child pornography on a colleague’s laptop.

Weiner, 40, a married father of two from Dagenham, hatched what was described as a “wickedly evil and vile plot” to get his boss, caretaker Eddie Thompson, sacked from Swanlea Secondary School in Whitechapel.

Weiner launched the plot in 2006, hoping to get Mr Thompson sacked so that he could be promoted, the Old Bailey heard.

He planted the 177 indecent images of children on his boss’s PC, then sent police the CD claiming he had found the images on Mr Thompson’s laptop.

Judge David Paget told him: “What you did to a decent and honest man was in my view wicked.

“It is difficult to imagine a more cunning, deceitful or warped course of conduct than yours in this case, or a more malicious one.”

Mr Thompson was arrested in October 2006. It took eight months before police decided no further action would be taken.

Richard Milne, prosecuting, told jurors that others who found out about it were “horrified by what you may think was a wickedly evil and vile plot”.

Mr Thompson and his wife became afraid to leave the house, after he received threats and they were spat at in public, because details of the allegations were leaked by Weiner to a local newspaper. Even when he returned to the school where he had worked since 1993, Mr Thompson said he was shunned by nearly all the staff, making his life “almost unbearable”.

Weiner was arrested in 2007 after a mobile phone used to make an initial anonymous call to police about Mr Thompson was traced to him.

The judge said there was no evidence that Weiner was a paedophile but his conviction for possession of the images meant that he had to be placed on the sex offenders register.

“You will go to prison for a long time. The prison population is not renowned for being particularly fair or reasonable,” he said. “You will be suspected by many of being a paedophile and, like Mr Thompson, you may find that you suffer, both in prison and on release, for the rest of your life.”

Weiner was also found guilty of possessing a further 355 indecent images of children on a CD, ranked from level 1 to 4 – the second most serious. He was convicted in August.

School caretaker found guilty of planting child pornography on boss

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