Net meeting leads to rape

September 28, 2004

A British man has been found guilty of rape and indecent assault of a 13-year-old girl he met over the internet by pretending to be a girl.

John McIver, 39, first presented himself online as a girl named Lisa in order to befriend the teen, then telephoned her at home while pretending to be Lisa's father.

He was arrested two weeks after breaking into the girl's home and attacking her in Warwickshire, a central England county near Birmingham, when detectives turned the tables on McIver by posing to be a girl on the internet and arranged to meet him.

McIver admitted visiting the victim's village but denied the rape. A DNA sample of his partially matched saliva samples taken at the crime scene, and the teen later picked him out of a line-up.

George Stepney, a police detective who worked on the case, described the man as a "predatory paedophile who 'lived' in the internet" and said he was guilty of "entrapment".

Judge Marten Coates at the tribunal in Warwick described the attack as an "exceptionally grave offence" and suggested McIver's sentence, due next month, would be heavy.