An Australian sex offender has been sentenced to more than seven years for the online abuse of two girls in Cebu.
Matthias Wolfgang Baden, aged 58, paid the mother of the girls more than $26,000 dollars to maintain a “relationship” with the girls over Skype. The children were aged just two and seven when the abuse began.
Campbelltown District Court was told that the Sydney man had described himself as “some old man in love with little girls”.
He has now been sentenced to a non-parole period of seven years and four months in the Campbelltown District Court by Judge Nicole Noman SC, after pleading guilty last year to a range of offences including procuring a child for sex and and engaging in sexual activity with child under 16 outside Australia.
Baden’s arrest at his home in September 2016 was the culmination of a cross-border investigation that combined the efforts of the Queensland Police specialist child abuse task force Argos, the Australian Federal Police Manila post and the Philippine National Police (PNP).
He was linked to the Filipino family following a raid on their family home in Cebu province.
The PNP raided the home after child pornography was discovered by Queensland police in the home of a separate suspect in 2015.
Baden was arrested five days after this raid, having been identified by a photograph seized at the Filipino property.
His relationship with the family began about 2010, when he stayed with the family.
Baden stayed with the family on one further occasion, and then subsequently maintained contact with them online.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Baden was previously convicted in 1992 for three counts of unlawful sexual intercourse with his 13-year-old stepdaughter. For this, he two years of a four-year jail sentence.
In July last year the children’s 36-year-old mother was sentenced to 20 years, convicted of wilfully recruiting and offering a minor, to a “foreign customer” for purposes of prostitution, pornography and sexual exploitation.
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