A former maths teacher from Barkingside has been jailed for 25 years after being convicted of 37 child sexual abuse offences. Syed Shahreear Ahmed, 37, of Mossford Lane, Barkingside, was sentenced at Southwark Crown Court on Thursday, 5 November, with a further eight years to be served on extended licence. He had been found guilty on 10 July following a second trial.

Ahmed, who was already serving time for child sex abuse offences, has now been convicted of 56 child sexual abuse offences relating to 18 victims in total. Court reporting said the new term included a further 10 years to run consecutively to the 15-year sentence he was already serving. The judge, Judge Perrins, said Ahmed remained a danger to the public and would have imposed a life sentence if all of the offences had been dealt with at the same time.

According to the Metropolitan Police, Ahmed used fake online identities on popular social media apps, with altered photographs, to groom girls aged between 13 and 16 before arranging meetings and sexually abusing them. He posed as a 17-year-old boy called Miles on the apps Wizz, Yubo and Snapchat. The 37 offences he was convicted of included rape, sexual assault, sexual communication with a child, meeting a child following sexual grooming, child sexual exploitation and offences relating to indecent images of children.

The investigation was led by detectives from the Met’s Online Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation team, who uncovered 12 further victims and offences hidden in hundreds of gigabytes of digital evidence seized from Ahmed’s mobile phones. Announcing the sentence, the Met urged parents to stay alert to online grooming and to talk to their children about who they speak to online. The full police account is published in the Metropolitan Police’s release.