British national Richard Huckle is seen after his arrest on multiple charges of sexual abuse of children in an image handed out by Britain’s National Crime Agency June 2, 2016.
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Richard Huckle, 30, has already admitted to raping and assaulting 23 children, aged between six months and 12 years, in Cambodia and the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.
It took more than one hour for the list of gruesome charges to be read out in court on Wednesday with Huckle facing 22 life sentences when the three-day hearing ends on Friday.
Huckle targeted an impoverished Christian community in Malaysia where he posed as a student, photographer and English teacher to groom his victims.
In January, Huckle pleaded not guilty to 91 charges but ahead of his trial in April, he gradually admitted 71 of the offences over the course of five more hearings.
After arresting McCoole, police actually took over running Love Zone to track down child sex offenders, eventually uncovering the identity of Richard Huckle, who was arrested in 2014 at Gatwick Airport when he returned home for Christmas, BBC reports the gripping account of how they finally brought the monster to justice.
He first visited Malaysia on a teaching gap year when he was 18 or 19 and went on to groom children while doing voluntary work.
“If indeed police reports by the victims’ families were lodged against Huckle, then the next question will be, what have the police done following the reports?” she said in a statement today.
Investigators found more than 20,000 images of child pornography on his computer and he boasted about his crimes to other paedophiles online.
Huckle also produced a paedophile manual, called a “child lover’s guide”, giving tips to other child abusers on how to avoid getting caught.
The manual was ready for publication on the “dark web”, a part of the Internet that requires specific software, configurations and authorisations to access.
In one exchange found online, he wrote about “hitting the jackpot” after discovering a 3-year-old girl who he said was as “loyal as a dog”.
Huckle’s crimes were so serious that prosecutors planned three separate Old Bailey trials as they felt one jury could not cope with viewing all the videos and photographs of abuse.
Twenty-two of the offences he admitted to carry discretionary life sentences and 18 of these are multiple incident counts.
Huckle was also accused of attempting to crowd-fund his abuse online using Bitcoin on a website called PedoFunding.
He went on to post a stream pictures and video of himself raping his young victims which were shared worldwide on the dark web.
‘His mother was extremely upset and extremely angry.
Judge Peter Rook has said he was considering a life sentence in the case, which he said was one of “exceptional gravity”.
A spokesman said Huckle completed the course which provides training to individuals to teach adult learners.
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Huckle used websites on the dark web to sell indecent images to other pedophiles. “And internet service providers must take responsibility to cleanse the web of these images and prevent them from being viewed in the first place”.
