Teacher guilty of child abduction

MATHS teacher Jeremy Forrest, who fled to France with a 15-year-old pupil, has been convicted of child abduction at Lewes Crown Court.

An international police hunt had been launched for the pair after a surveillance video on a cross-Channel ferry captured them.

Forrest had driven to Calais and then Paris with the girl, who cannot be named, and was arrested in Bordeaux after a British expat spotted him standing with her outside a hotel.

He faces a maximum of seven years’ jail after the prosecution called him “a paedophile” who had “groomed” the girl, a pupil of his in Eastbourne, East Sussex.

She had told the court that they went to France at her instigation, but the prosecution rejected this, saying that in the case of a minor consent was not a consideration.