Accuser says extradition case against alleged UK serial child abuser ‘a step towards justice’

Warning: This article contains details of the sexual abuse of children.

Neil Douglas, 60, wept when he heard that his alleged abuser, Iain Wares, 86, had finally been arrested in South Africa.

“It feels like the first real step in securing justice for myself and the 65 others who made complaints against him on that arrest warrant, and the seven others who initially made the first complaints.”

Douglas is the spokesperson for Wares’ alleged victims in the UK and is himself a survivor.

Wares is wanted by Scottish prosecutors and is facing extradition to stand trial on sexual offences charges against young boys at Edinburgh schools in the 1970s. He surrendered to police at the Simon’s Town Magistrates’ Court in October 2025, where he was arrested on a UK warrant. His extradition case is scheduled to resume on 13 January 2026.

The latest UK consolidation request sets out a devastating picture. Wares is now accused of sexually and physically abusing 65 boys, with the indictment listing a total of 90 charges.

When he was first arrested in May 2019 — and declared extraditable three months later — he faced only seven counts. The number of alleged victims and charges has since skyrocketed, revealing the true scale of the abuse long hidden from justice.

These charges include 60 counts of sexual assault, four counts of rape, 25 counts of assault and a count of crimen injuria.

Douglas attended Edinburgh Academy from 1967 to 1979 and was in Wares’ class, where he claims he and his classmates were subjected to relentless sexual and physical abuse.

Douglas told Daily Maverick in November: “I know many others have felt a similar release as the realisation dawned that justice is finally beginning to happen after all these years. In saying that, we can’t forget the many who have taken their own lives in the last 50 years, nor those who have just been unable to make a complaint to Police Scotland for whatever reason; often because they do not want to relive the trauma by talking about it.”

Douglas was in the Wynberg Regional Court in April when Wares briefly appeared on a charge of allegedly sexually abusing a 12-year-old Rondebosch Boys’ Prep pupil in 1988 — the man is now 47. Wares maintains he did not physically or sexually abuse the victim.

BBC presenter Nicky Campbell is among former UK pupils who have made allegations against Wares.

The charges stem from the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry set up in October 2015 to consider the abuse of children in care in Scotland.

‘Boys had no idea what he was doing’

Recounting the events he allegedly experienced, Douglas claimed that Wares targeted 8- to 10-year-old boys to satisfy his sexual urges by digitally raping and masturbating them, boys who had no idea what he was doing or the significance of it.

“There are no adequate words to describe somebody who is able to behave like that toward children whilst maintaining that he was acting ‘in locum parentis’; ie he was in effect acting as their father.

“Wares hid in plain sight. His sexual assaults were usually carried out in the classroom under the guise of marking homework as he ensured the boy was standing directly beside him, and in a school where corporal punishment was routine, he was able to violently assault us, as unless someone examined the wounds, they wouldn’t realise that he was using excessive force,” Douglas said.

The allegations, Douglas said, first surfaced in a Scottish newspaper in 2001. Wares’ name was not published at the time, but survivors insist they had been reporting Wares to the police at various points for decades, only to be ignored. Douglas claims that it was not until 2016 that a complaint was taken seriously.

“The extradition process has been painfully slow. It took seven years from the initial request being filed to Wares finally losing his appeal in South Africa in August 2024.

“Even if he is extradited, we fear that every legal trick available will be used to stop the coward from facing his accusers. We would respect him more if he chose to plead guilty and face the consequences of doing so, but we fear he is a coward who will do everything he can to avoid answering for his actions,” Douglas told Daily Maverick.

In August 2024, the Western Cape Division of the High Court in Cape Town upheld a decision that Wares could be extradited, though only on three of the initial seven charges raised in South Africa, due to the others being time-barred under South African law at the time they were issued.

In late 2024, the UK authorities submitted further consolidated charges to address the prescription issue, and the case continues as Wares challenges the process.

‘Uncontrollable’ urges

According to court papers filed during his failed bid to block extradition — dismissed by the high court on 8 August 2024 — Wares stated that he was appointed as a primary school teacher at Edinburgh Academy in 1968.

The documents paint a stark and disturbing picture of his past. After graduating from a local university in 1962 with a psychology degree, he secured teaching posts at several boys’ schools despite having no formal teaching qualification.

The scariest and most sickening aspect is when he reveals how, over time, his urges to sexually molest learners overtook him to the extent that he could no longer control himself, and his conduct became habitual.

What makes the account even more unsettling is Wares’ own explanation of how he tried — and failed — to manage his impulses long before he entered Edinburgh Academy. He claimed that in 1967, he consulted a local mental-health practitioner who recommended specific therapeutic interventions. When these yielded no success, he was advised to seek specialised treatment in Scotland from a therapist dealing with his “condition”. He relocated that same year.

While under treatment, Wares qualified as a teacher and took up employment at exclusive boys-only schools where he once again committed various sexual offences.

In 1973, he was appointed as a primary school teacher at Fettes Junior College in Edinburgh. He claimed his sadistic behaviour persisted until 1979, when a student complained that Wares had touched his private parts.

In 1979, after a learner reported to the principal that he had been sexually molested, Wares was exposed and dismissed. He left Scotland soon after, returning to South Africa with his wife, whom he had met and married here previously. Wares claims he confessed his abusive past to her and insists that, once back home, he did not commit any further sexual offences.

Wares’ initial arrest in South Africa followed a 2018 request by the United Kingdom’s High Commissioner, who formally asked local authorities to extradite him under the Extradition Act 67 of 1962.

SA charge denied despite long history

After being accused in Edinburgh and fired from Fettes College in 1979, Wares moved to South Africa and taught at Rondebosch Boys’ Prep until retiring in 2006.

But his career was again tainted by alleged abuse — this time a 1988 incident in which he reportedly molested a pupil, “Stephen”. That case is now before the Wynberg Regional Court.

Stephen, now 47, was 12 years old at the time of alleged abuse at Rondebosch Prep. It is claimed that Wares stroked his buttocks and brushed his genitals against the victim.

Because the proceedings are held in camera, limited details are publicly available. However, when Wares — who has pleaded not guilty — took the stand on 14 October to testify in his own defence, he claimed he had no recollection of the complainant. Yet moments later, he conceded that he did remember teaching the boy geography twice a week, revealing an inconsistency in his testimony.

‘A career offender’

On Tuesday, 25 November, Luke Lamprecht, Head of Advocacy at Women and Men Against Child Abuse, said the Wares case exposed a far deeper, systemic failure.

He describes Wares as a “career offender” because that type of person chooses jobs that give them access to children and makes a career of abusing children.

“What this case shows,” he said, “is how institutional cultures can attract these career offenders, enable them and then hide them.”

Summarising the anguish of a Cape Town survivor who recently came forward, Lamprecht said: “When the survivor speaks, he reminds people that although he is now a strong adult man — someone who has built himself up to feel safe — the “optics” in court are all wrong. Wares arrives with walking sticks and hearing aids, appearing as a frail old man. So people immediately think, ‘shame, he’s old’,” he said.

Lamprecht said that while the victim was now in his 40s, he entered court as the 10-year-old boy who was abused.

“The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry was enormous in scale, and it exposed how institutions that were supposed to educate and protect children became playgrounds for paedophiles. These predators were supported — sometimes even shielded — by systems that simply moved them from one school to another. Our ultimate goal is to see a similar inquiry into the boys’ schools of South Africa,” he said.

Wares appeared in the Wynburg Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday, 2 November, over the case of abuse in South Africa. According to Women and Men Against Child Abuse, “What unfolded was a striking display of selective memory, implausible denials and testimony that once again exposed the entrenched power dynamics that historically enabled his abuse.”

Closing arguments in that case are scheduled for 19 February 2026. DM