Sadowski was to start work in two weeks

A student teacher jailed for attempting to buy a child over the internet for sex was due to start work experience at a school just two weeks after his arrest.

Luke Sadowski, 19, was jailed yesterday for three years after being caught in a police sting when he contacted a US website offering "to fulfil unique desires".

The teenager, a student at a college in Canterbury, had been due to start a week-long placement at a primary school in his home town of Bishop's Stortford a fortnight before his arrest last October.

Officers from the Met's paedophile unit who arrested him at a London hotel found him with a replica Glock handgun and a teddy bear.

Sadowski was in the first week of a foundation science course at the Canterbury Christ Church University College when he was arrested at a hotel on 4 October last year.

He was expecting to meet a nineor 10-year-old girl at the hotel after writing emails to the website requesting "a girl aged roughly 10 of white race for three nights" and saying he was willing to pay the $350 requested by the site.

But the website was a front set up by US police, who immediately contacted their UK colleagues.

Sadowski pleaded guilty at Southwark Crown Court to attempting to incite another to procure a girl under the age of 21 and possession of an imitation firearm with intent to commit an indictable offence.