Suspect ordered held without bond

A doctoral student at the University of Georgia was arrested Wednesday for engaging in sexually explicit conversation online with a girl he thought was 15 years old, police said.

The “girl” was actually an undercover Peachtree City police officer who took out arrest warrants for Govinda Bahadur Basnet, 41, of Athens.

Basnet is also accused of sending explicit photos to the undercover officer, police said. The background of the photos were matched to the tile in the bathroom of Basnet’s on-campus apartment, and he issued a confession to police, said Police Chief James Murray.

Fayette Magistrate Joe Tinsley denied Basnet’s bond in a hearing Thursday afternoon. He has no family here in the United States, Murray said.

In addition to being a doctoral candidate for the university’s anthropology department, Basnet is a native of Nepal and is in the United States on a student visa, police said. It is not immediately clear whether or not the charge will affect his visa status.

The undercover officer who works these investigations does so on a part-time basis, police said. Murray has said parents in the area should take steps to protect their children online by keeping the family computer in a visible area where activity can be monitored. Special software is also available to secretly track communications on a given computer also.

Basnet lived on campus in housing with his wife and two-year-old child, Murray said. During Thursday’s bond hearing, he cried so hard at times that he was unintelligible, Murray added.

Basnet is the third non-American resident out of 18 similar arrests the department has undertaken in the ongoing Internet sting, Murray noted.

According to the University of Georgia’s web site, Basnet was doing doctoral work in ecological and environmental anthropology. Previously he received a Masters degree in ecological agriculture from the Wageningen Agricultural University in Holland. He also has worked for the United Nations in two different national parks in Nepal and he also taught plant pathology for two years, he said on the web site.

UGA officials apparently have taken down Basnet’s biography from the graduate student web site, but a copy of it was located elsewhere on the Internet.

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