A convicted Australian paedophile who raped and abused children in Indonesia over a nine-year period has been detained in Ubon Ratchathani where he has been teaching teenagers for eight months.
Peter Dundas Walbran, a former head of the Australian International School in Jakarta, was taken into custody by Thai and Australian Federal Police who spent five hours searching his room at the Chan Mansion on Pasi Charoen Road in Muang district for child pornography, said Pol Lt Col Paisit Sangkhahapong, head of the Department of Special Investigation's Foreign Affairs and Transnational Crime Bureau.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Walbran was jailed in 2012 for the rape and molestation of Indonesian boys as young as eight.
The newspaper said he was employed as a teacher at Narinukun International School in the northeastern province, despite extensive media coverage of his prior child-molestation crimes. Pol Lt Col Paisit said he entered Thailand last year.
The Narinukun school cancelled Walbran's work contract on Wednesday, the report said.
He was held at an immigration detention centre and was expected to be transferred to Bangkok on Wednesday. He will be deported to Australia after his visa was cancelled and he was declared persona non grata by immigration officials.
The Sydney newspaper noted Walbran was supposed to have been listed on Australia's National Child Offender Register.
The report said police in Ubon Ratchathani had had Walbran under surveillance for some time and saw him with children from his neighbourhood several times since Monday.
Authorities also plan to question a young Thai man who has been living with Walbran, the newspaper reported.
Walbran was sentenced to three years' jail on the Indonesian island of Lombok in 2012 where he paid about 100 baht for sexual services. He was suspended from his school in 2007 and returned to Australia before the police investigation was complete.
He was extradited to Indonesia in October 2011 and served almost two years of the three-year term on Lombok before being deported to Australia in April last year.
He was ordered to register his Indonesian convictions with Australia's National Child Offender Register, but failed to do so. He then left the country early this year on a New Zealand passport, the Morning Herald said.
Had he been on the child-sex-offender register he would have been required to report his travel plans and Australian police would have alerted Thai authorities.