From correspondents in Kathmandu, Nepal, 03:32 PM IST

A 41-year-old Nepali, doing his Ph.D. in the US, has been arrested and charged with trying to lure to bed an undercover police agent posing as an underage teenaged girl.

Govinda Bahadur Basnet, a former teacher from Chitwan district in southern Nepal, who was doing his Ph.D. in ecological and environmental anthropology at the Georgia University, was arrested Wednesday after he struck up an acquaintanceship with an undercover agent posing as a 15-year-old girl in an Internet chat room and plied her with sexual conversation and explicit pictures.

He set up a date with the undercover officer in Peachtree City, where he lives with his wife and two-year-old son, and was arrested and produced in court.

'He was planning to set up a meeting with the undercover officer 'as soon as he could sneak away' but as soon as we learned he was the father of a two-year-old and was living in the married residences at Georgia with a number of young children around him, we felt we had to go get him,' a local report said quoting the police chief heading the operation.

Basnet created a sensation in the courtroom Thursday, weeping hysterically every time the magistrate asked him a question. He was denied bail on the ground he had no job or ties in the US.

The university dismissed him immediately after his arrest.

Basnet, who had received his graduate degree from the US as well, is pleading for clemency on the ground that his family lived on the stipend from the university. He said it was his only income and that his wife was not employed.