A British property developer whose family owned large estates in Ireland has been sentenced to 14 years in prison after a Thai court found him guilty of sexually abusing two boys, writes Andrew Drummond in Bangkok.
A judge in Bangkok ruled that Robert Alexander Horsman (46), from Ipswich, lured two 12-year-old boys to his home in Pattaya and molested them.
Horsman has been arrested three times for child sex offences since 2006, the latest of which was in 2008, with help of officers from Britain’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP).
He avoided jail on the first two arrests, but yesterday the former public schoolboy was given 12 years for molesting minors and two years for luring minors away from their parents.
Horsman, originally from Saxmundham, Suffolk, grew up in Ireland. He has a work permit in Thailand to run a property business for a company based in Co Tipperary, where his family had large land holdings, including hundreds of acres near Ballingarry. He attended Headfort Preparatory School in Co Meath.
He begins his sentence immediately in Klong Prem prison in the Thai capital.
The arrest of Horsman and another Briton, an American and a German was described as a triumph of international police co-operation by CEOP boss Jim Gamble. Horsman, however, was the only one of the four people arrested to be convicted.