last updated: Thursday 11 June 2009, 22:50pm

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Trucker jailed for schoolgirl kidnap

Robert Williams

A lorry driver who had sex with a 15-year-old girl he groomed on the internet and then took to France has been jailed for five years.

Robert Williams was on bail at the time of the incident in January this year after meeting a 16-year-old on the internet then having sex with her in a hotel room.

But just weeks later, Williams travelled from his home in Scotland to meet the 'naive' and 'vulnerable' 15-year-old who had told friends she had fallen in love with Williams and they would become engaged in the future.

He took her from her home in north east Lincolnshire on January 14 and the pair travelled by train from Grimsby to Doncaster and then on to London, where they booked into a hotel room and had unprotected sex twice.

The next day they travelled to France on a ferry from Dover and were found a week after disappearing, on January 21, when they went to the British Consulate in Lille.

Judge Tremberg told Williams it was a 'harebrained scheme' and said laws were in place to 'protect naive and inexperienced young girls from their own instincts and emotions, as well as to protect them from sexual predators like you'.

He said: 'She appears to have been a particularly naive young girl for her years and vulnerable to the attentions of a man like you.

'She fell in love with who she thought you were and she became besotted with you. She thought one day you might become engaged.'

The girl's family welcomed the sentence. In a statement read by Detective Chief Inspector Sharon Fielding, of Humberside Police, they said: 'We are pleased that this man is now behind bars as it means we can put this ordeal behind us and move on as a family.

Williams, 49, of Glebe Road, Whitburn, Scotland, was sentenced at Grimsby Crown Court after earlier pleading guilty to child abduction and sexual activity with a child.

© Independent Television News Limited 2009. All rights reserved.