Image capture of video by The Star Online via Youtube channel - Richard Huckle is facing 22 life sentences after pleading guilty to 71 accounts of child sex offense
- From 2006 to 2014, Huckle preyed on up to 200 children from poor communities
- He committed sex crimes against children aged 6 months to 12 years old
Richard Huckle, a freelance photographer from Ashford, Kent, admitted 71 counts of offenses against up to 200 children from poor communities in Malaysia aged six months to 12 years old from 2006 to 2014, and has been handed 22 life sentences, with at least 25 years in prison.
Huckle, 30, presented himself as a devout Christian, English teacher, and photographer, and first visited Malaysia on a teaching gap year when he was 18 or 19.
He then went on to groom children while doing voluntary work in orphanages and impoverished communities, but his activities were far from innocent as Huckle used his position of trust to sexually abuse hundreds of children, according to an article published by BBC.
Judge Peter Rook QC said Huckle’s sentence reflected the “public abhorrence” over his “campaign of rape” spanning for almost a decade.
“Relentlessly, you preyed upon the very young, pre-pubescent vulnerable children from a minority ethnic community into which you ingratiated yourself. You have spent years abusing them. In one of your postings you stated that you had become consumed by your pedophilia. Your life revolved around your obsession with your own sexual gratification by child sex abuse,” said Rook.
“It is also clear that, had you not been arrested, you planned to continue the same lifestyle using the expertise that you were keen to show off to and share with other abusers so as to continue your sexual exploitation of the children of such communities,” Rook added.
British police arrested Huckle at London Gatwick Airport in December 2014 as he returned home from Malaysia to spend Christmas with his parents. He was carrying a heavily-encrypted computer and camera that contained over 20,000 images of child sex abuse, over 1,000 of which showed him committing offenses including rape, as per an article published by Rappler.
Rook, taking a quote from the manual Huckle was working on — titled ‘Pedophiles And Poverty: Child Lover Guide’, said “impoverished kids are definitely much easier to seduce than middle-class Western kids.”
“It is a truly evil document that speaks volumes about the scale of your delusion,” said the judge.
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