A UNIVERSITY lecturer tried to meet a “12-year-old girl” for sex – and had a mattress decorated with fairy lights in his lounge.

Bhusan Chettri has been jailed for more than three years after he was caught out by undercover police officers in Grays.

The 36-year-old of Merchant Street, London, is originally from India but was working as a data analytics lecturer at Queen Mary University of London.

In November last year, he messaged a profile called “Ella” on the online chat room site “321chat”, who described herself as a 12-year-old girl.

Chettri posed as a 15-year-old boy and claimed that he liked younger girls and sent various sexualised messages to the profile, encouraging her to perform sex acts on herself to “practice” for when they met up in person.

During the hundreds of messages sent between them, Chettri also sent indecent images of children to the profile, along with other sexual images.

Chettri was sentenced at Basildon Crown Court on Tuesday.

Prosecuting, Bridget Todd said: “He sent her a message saying ‘It’s illegal to like younger girls but that’s just the way he felt.”

“Ella” was in fact an undercover police officer, and Chettri had agreed with the profile that he would meet her at Grays train station on December 2 last year, as he “had a friend’s room” to stay in. When he arrived, he was confronted by officers and arrested.

Ms Todd continued: “His address in London was searched.

“They saw a mattress had been placed in the middle of the lounge floor with fairy lights around it.”

Mitigating, Nick Bonehill said Chettri, who was married, had been working long hours and had been suffering from depression.

He said: “He was married and working a significant amount of hours per day.

“Things became difficult between him and his wife and he constantly engaged in suicidal thoughts.

“He has his head in his hands out of shame for himself and his family.”

Judge Samantha Leigh jailed Chettri for three years and four months for attempting to facilitate a child sex offence and distributing an indecent image of a child.