An international row has broken out on the Dutch island of Curaçao following the arrest of a former teacher for the possession of child pornography in the United States. Until this summer, the 34-year-old man had been teaching infants at the island’s prestigious International School.

The man, US citizen Stephen Wayne Sudduth, was arrested in Texas at the end of October for possessing and distributing child pornography. In a raid on his home, the Texan Cyber Crimes Unit found 57,000 pornographic photos and 10,000 videos containing sexually explicit material featuring young girls stored on his computer and external media.

The news has met with a heated response from parents at the school on the Caribbean island in the Netherlands Antilles. They say they had complained about the man’s behaviour during his time as a teacher.

The local Antilliaans Dagblad newspaper reports one parent as saying, “From the start the man behaved strangely. He ignored the boys and entirely focused on the girls in an almost excessive way. We complained several times to the school about Sudduth’s behaviour, but we got no response. Instead he was actually given an extra job at the after-school club.”

However, the school says Mr Sudduth was carefully vetted before being appointed. Officials from the school in Texas where Sudduth worked from 2000 to 2006 also say background checks revealed nothing that would have excluded him from being a teacher.

In a news conference, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott did not rule out that there may be further arrests in the case, as he expected Mr Sudduth was part of a larger child pornography ring. He said the extent of the collection and number of children abused in producing the material was shocking.