COMBER MAN HANDED PROBATION AND SEX OFFENDERS’ MEASURES AFTER ATTEMPTED ONLINE GROOMING
A would-be paedophile ‘duped’ into thinking he was meeting a school boy but backed out at the last minute was spared jail today.Instead Alexander McKibben was handed an enhanced combination order of 75 hours community services and two years probation.
Judge Geoffrey Miller QC told the 56-year-old the sentence, designed to protect the public, would allow for him to undergo extensive therapeutic work and to engage in intensive programmes.
Belfast Crown Court heard McKibben, from Killinchy Road in Comber, was arrested by police outside Dundonald Ice Bowl in March last year following a sting operation mounted by a “paedophile hunter group”.
Judge Miller said the fact McKibben “backed out through nerves” was significant affording him a degree of mitigation, supporting as it did a “dawning realisation on his part of the seriousness of what he’d initiated” online.
In written submissions from prosecution lawyer David McClean it emerged McKibben thought he was to meet a 15-year-old boy called Mal he’d sexually groomed through a gay dating app.
However while he went to meet Mal, he seemed to have reconsidered, and appeared to call the whole thing off.
Mr McClean said McKibben sent text messages in which he also said he “was too nervous”, but by this time he’d been identified by the ‘hunter group’ outside the Ice Bowl who took his car keys and held him until the arrival of police who arrested him.
In his sentencing remarks Judge Miller said he’d also adopted the helpful detailed written submissions of defence counsel Tom MacCreanor and the reports he supplied which indicated McKibben’s expressions of remorse were not entirely self serving.
However, he added while there could be little doubt McKibben’s offending involving highly sexualised chats was intrinsically serious, it was difficult to understand why such a mature married man with no previous convictions should seek to groom a child for sexual purposes.
As part of his sentence McKibben, who admitted attempting to meet a child following sexual grooming, was also placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for five years and made subject of a SOPO (Sexual Offences Prevention Order), for the same period.
