Malaysia to groom families and gain access to their very young children
has been sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to 71 child
abuse offences.
was sentenced in a London court on Monday, June 7, to 22 life prison
terms to be served concurrently, meaning he faces more than 23 years
behind bars before a parole board can consider his release.
An investigation by the National Crime Agency’s
CEOP Command was launched into Richard Huckle after he was
identified as the producer of indecent images on a child abuse website
on the internet.
When NCA officers arrested him in 2014, they
found 20,000 indecent images on his computer, 1,117 of which showed him
raping and abusing children in his care. He had also created a 60 page
โhow to guideโ for other paedophiles, giving tips on how to abuse
children and evade capture. This document was ready for publishing
online. His behaviour included creating a โscore cardโ to rate how many
children he had abused.
Huckle, from Ashford in Kent, first
visited Kuala Lumpur in 2005. He took a gap year placement in a township
in the city, which is not being named to protect the victims.
staying with a local family. Whilst there, he took indecent images of a
child in the family aged around three.
He also returned to
Malaysia, where he met two girls, aged four and six. In 2007 he stayed
with the girls’ family, taking up a voluntary teaching post at a small
tuition centre in the village. He first sexually abused and took
photographs of the girls in 2006. This abuse continued for the next
eight years until his arrest.
Between 2005 and 2010, Huckle
visited Malaysia eight times. In 2010, he moved to Malaysia permanently
and enrolled at the Kuala Lumpur Metropolitan University to study
information technology. From May 2011, he started working as a freelance
professional photographer.
Huckle gained the trust of the
families he groomed by providing English language tuition for the
children. Between 2006 and 2014, he sexually abused a further 12
children including 10 girls and two boys. Five of the children were
living in a childrenโs home.
In one incident, he took a victim for a day out to celebrate her 5th birthday and sexually abused her at his house.
was arrested at Gatwick Airport on 19th December 2014 as he flew back
to the UK from Malaysia. The CEOP Commandโs Victim Identification team
conducted a detailed analysis of over 20,000 indecent images of children
recovered from Huckleโs computers and cameras, in order to identify the
time, date and locations of abuse, as well as securing enough evidence
to prove who the victims were and the acts committed against them. This
enabled the prosecution to go ahead without the need for the victims to
give evidence in court.
rape of a child under 13 years old, relating to five victims aged
between three and 12 at the time of the abuse, and the sexual assault of
a baby believed to be six months old. The charges also include inciting
two victims, aged three and 10, to engage in sexual activity with each
other, which Huckle photographed.
James Traynor from the NCAโs CEOP command said:
“Richard
Huckle spent several years integrating himself into the community in
which he lived, making himself a trusted figure. But he abused that
trust in the worst possible way.
“He deliberately travelled to a part of the world where he thought he could abuse vulnerable children without being caught.
“The
NCA worked to track down Huckle and end his prolific abuse, using
Section 72 legislation in this case, which allows UK nationals to be
prosecuted in the UK for offences that have been committed overseas.
Borders are no barrierโ we are determined that those who go abroad to
abuse children will be held to account.”
