At first glance, there was nothing really out of the ordinary about Richard Huckle. He was a Sunday School teacher and a friend.
But he also enjoyed making child pornography.
Described as Britain’s worst pedophile, Richard Huckle is facing a life sentence in jail after he admitted to a string of sex abuse on young Malaysian children. The depraved predator even took photos and video footage of himself raping and abusing the kids and even a toddler in a nappy.
The 30-year-old targeted poor Christian families in Malaysia, where he set himself up as a tutor for English and Bible studies in order to gain the trust of the victim’s parents and community leaders.
Although Huckle faced a total of 91 charges and has admitted to the sexual crimes of at least 23 children in Kuala Lumpur, aged between 6 months and 12 years, BBC reports that he has abused up to 200 children since he began his criminal activities when he was just 19.
It was reported that Huckle would detail his rapes and many other sexual acts in a series of notes in a sickening 60-page paedophile manual titled, “Paedophiles And Poverty: Child Lover Guide”. He even had plans “on publishing a guide on the subject sometime”, adding that he would love to make the documentation of his paedophilia a paying profession.
The encrypted manual was found on Huckle’s computer, intended to be published on the dark web where he wrote: “Impoverished kids are definitely much easier to seduce than middle class kids.” Investigators also found over 20,000 obscene images on his laptop and hard disks, many of them showing the Brit abusing children.
According to reports, Huckle would often use this encrypted part of the Internet to sell photos and videos of his victims to other fellow pedophiles in exchange for Bitcoins in order to gain access to his collection of media.
“Those images of child abuse will inevitably have been shared with other paedophiles and therefore been the subject of uncontrolled worldwide distribution,” said Prosecutor Brian O’Neill.
If that wasn’t horrific enough, Huckle even took donations from users using a website called “PedoFunding”, where he would award himself with “PedoPoints” for carrying out different attacks and sexual abuse.
He even boasted online about grooming 4 children from the same household for sex, abusing 5 vulnerable kids who were living in a children’s home, as well as bragging about “hitting the jackpot” with a 3-year-old who was “as loyal to me as my dog and nobody seemed to care”.
“It’s quite amazing to have stuck with the same child lover for so many years and I hope, from the images you have seen, enjoyed watching her grow. It’s not often in child porn you can compare the bodies of a 5yo and a 12yo that are the same girl. I’m sure I’ll have plenty more sex with (her) in the future,” Huckle wrote in one of his commentaries.
His campaign of depraved activities came to an end when Australian police tipped off the authorities in the UK about his offences. Huckle was arrested at London Gatwick airport in December 2014 when police found out he was flying to Britain from Malaysia for Christmas.
According to AFP, reports of this case have been kept under wraps until now because investigators wanted to be certain that these young victims were safe from other online predators.
Judge Peter Rook describe the charges to Huckle as “sexual offending of the utmost gravity”. This case, no doubts, highlights the urgent need to strike down on illegal material that is being distributed on the dark web.
Sources: The Star (1) (2), Heavy, Daily Mail, BBC.
