A schoolboy attending an elite English private school committed suicide after being blacmailed on Snapchat over nude photographs, an inquest has heard.
Dinal De Alwis, 16, attended Whitgift School in Croydon, south London, and was a gifted rugby and football player. He hoped to study at Cambridge after getting straight A*s in all his GCSEs.
Dinal took his own life in October 2022, days after returning from a family holiday in Mallorca during autumn half-term.
He left his home at 2am and was captured on CCTV plunging to his death around 3am.
The teen recorded a video, explaining that he planned to kill himself having received two naked images of himself from a social media blackmailer.
South London Coroner’s Court heard that the boy had been told to by the blackmailer to pay him £100 to stop sending the pictures to his followers.
According to the Telegraph, Dinal’s devastated family say they believe a girl may have taken the images with their son before they ended up with a third party.
The blackmailer is understood to have targeted other victims, the inquest heard.
The blackmailer said: “So you think blocking me can stop me? What do you want me to do – you want me to send it to all of your followers? Why can’t you just pay me? £100?”
The Metropolitan Police investigation into the death found that Dinal received messages in the hours leading up to his death from a man who officers think was “probably based in Nigeria”.
It is believed he was using a virtual private network (VPN) to disguise his whereabouts.
Kaushallya De Alwis, Dinal’s dad, told the inquest that his boy had not appeared unhappy but thought that he wanted to avoid the shame of the images being shared publicly.
The court heard that Mr De Alwis was proud that the brave and caring Dinal was proficient in English after the family came to the UK from Sri Lanka.
Discussing his son’s death, Mr De Alwis said Dinal’s suicide was “incredibly painful” and demonstrated that “the world is so cruel”.
It remains unclear how the nude photographs were obtained by the blackmailer. Mr De Alwis said: “It is still a big question mark”.
He added that he didn’t want other families to suffer similar experiences and said parents should be allowed to access their children’s social media accounts.
He told the Daily Mail: “Dinal had had some girlfriends, he’d been very open with me – I’d warned him to be careful. The grieving is never-ending.
“I’m very worried about my younger son – he’s big time into all this social media, and young people underestimate the dangers around them. There must be ways of tracking these things and parents should have access.
“I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”
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