UK Teen committed suicide after intimate photos were leaked on social media by Nigerian gang

June 17, 2015

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A UK teenager killed himself after an online Nigerian gang blackmailed him into posting intimate photographs on social media, according to his parents.

Three days before his death Ronan Hughes, 17, told his parents that the gang had threatened to share the photos with his friends on social media unless he paid them $5,000 (£3,300) within 48 hours, the Irish News newspaper reports.

Ronan took his own life hours after learning that the threat had been carried out, his mother said;

“He came to me and said ‘I’m in trouble here’,” she said in an interview with the Irish News daily newspaper.

“He gave me his phone. They were looking for more than £3,000 for an image he had posted and told him they were going to show it to all his friends.

“They had sent him a list of all his Facebook friends. He texted them back to say ‘but I’m only 17’.”

Mr Hughes brought his son to a Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) station at Dungannon immediately, but he said there was only one officer on duty at that time of the night and he said there was not a lot he could do.

“I knew Ronan was looking for help and I told him [the officer] that all my son wanted is for these images not to be posted,” he told the paper.

“He told us that he couldn’t guarantee that. For Ronan, it was totally dismissive.

“If the police had given Ronan reassurance and said ‘we’ll contact IT experts, we’ll close this down, we’ll stop that’, Ronan would still be here today.

“That’s why he came to us. He wanted help.”

The couple brought their son back to police the next day and spent a number of hours with officers but said they did not hear anything back over the next couple of days.

On the day of his death, Mrs Hughes said Ronan called her to say a friend had contacted him to say she had received a link containing images, but she had not opened them.

Mr Hughes left work early to go home amid concerns how his son might react.

When he arrived he found notes on the kitchen table and then discovered his son’s body in a field behind their home.