British paedophile faces multiple life sentences for scores of offences against children aged between six months and 12 years

One of Britain’s worst paedophiles is facing multiple life sentences after he posed as an English teacher to target, groom and abuse Malaysian babies and young children.

Richard Huckle, 30, a photographer from Ashford, Kent, admitted an “unprecedented and exceptional” 71 offences against children aged between six months and 12 years from 2006 to 2014.

He had faced 91 charges, with 23 children from mainly poor Christian communities in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, identified, though investigators believe he abused up to 200 young victims after persuading their families he was a respectable Christian philanthropist.

Of one, he bragged: “I’d hit the jackpot, a three-year-old girl as loyal to me as my dog and nobody seemed to care,” the Old Bailey heard.

His catalogue of abuse stretched back to when he was 19 and on a gap year, teaching in south-east Asia. After his arrest, more than 20,000 obscene images of boys and girls taken during his visits to the far east were found on his computer.

Described as a “constant groomer”, he boasted about his crimes on the “dark web”. He put together a 60-page manual, Paedophiles and Poverty: Child Love Guide, on how to select deprived victims and avoid detection, which was found encrypted on his laptop and which he planned to publish online. He wanted to create a “Paedo Wiki guide”, the court heard.

The laptop also contained a “Pedopoints” ledger, a game he devised awarding himself different points for 15 different levels of depravity on children, which he rated from “basic” to “hardcore”, and which he also wrote about on a paedophile website.

He attempted to crowdfund his abuse online using bitcoin, posting footage of a three-year-old girl and making 105% of the target funding, the court heard.

Arrested at Gatwick airport by National Crime Agency (NCA) officials when he returned home for Christmas in 2014, he initially pleaded not guilty to all 91 charges, then gradually admitted 71 counts.

The NCA was tipped off about Huckle as part of an international police operation in late 2014, and after analysing his online posts and photographs, concluded the majority of his victims were being abused in Malaysia, although one was targeted in Cambodia. He was charged under legislation allowing a British suspect to be charged for crimes abroad.

On paedophile forums, he boasted: “Impoverished kids are definitely much, much easier to seduce than middle-class western kids; I still plan to publish a guide on this subject.” He said poorer families were impressed by his “high status”.

He targeted and groomed the children of deprived families, impressing them with his “relative wealth and status as a westerner”, said prosecutor Brian O’Neill QC.

Of the charges, 14 were for rape, five digital penetration, 31 sexual assaults, six grooming children to expose or touch themselves or other children sexually, 12 for taking photographs and one of arranging or facilitating child sex offences relating to the manual.

O’Neill said the admitted abuse meant public interest did not require a trial on the outstanding 20 counts, which could lie on file.

Born and brought up in Britain, Huckle was described as a loner spending his teenage years on his computer before travelling to south-east Asia. His earliest recorded abuse, when he was 19, involved a two-year-old in Cambodia, though his other victims were in Malaysia. Some were abused over many years, and groomed to abuse each other.

“Frequently the abuse included taking photographs of those children, editing them to achieve anonymity and uploading still and moving images and graphic details of his exploits to the paedophile network TLZ [The Love Zone, since closed down] on the hidden internet also known as the ‘dark web’,” said O’Neill.

His sentencing hearing, which began on Wednesday, is expected to last until Friday. At an earlier hearing, Judge Peter Rook QC, warned him the counts he had admitted to “amount to sexual offending of the utmost gravity and as a result I am considering life sentences in your case”.

Huckle’s parents sold the family home and disappeared soon after his arrest. His sister-in-law told Sky News: “None of his family will speak about him. None of us ever want to see Richard again.”

Sky News also contacted Richard’s friends. Scott Chapman, who was at grammar school with him, and later at college, described Huckle as a loner, but not unusual. He said: “He never seemed off or anything like that. He just seemed like a normal person, just very quiet, didn’t really talk about home or things like that.”

When Chapman was shown the charge sheet showing what his friend had admitted to, he was briefly speechless and then said: “I’m genuinely shocked. I’m shaking. It makes you feel sick. A couple of the other guys we were friends with have kids in this age range. They are a little bit older than mine but he may have even been around our friends’ kids at this age.”

Senior officer James Traynor said Huckle was a “predatory paedophile” who “based his whole life around the sexual abuse of children, around the grooming of adults in order to gain access to their children”. Investigators believe there are more of his victims in south-east Asia.

Deputy head of operations, Det Supt Matthew Long, said Huckle was “one of the most committed, manipulative, conniving paedophiles” they had encountered.

Tony Cook, head of operations at Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) said: “There is no doubt that the quantity and quality of the offending of this particular individual would have increased had he not been arrested. He is only 30 years of age, so we can only imagine what sort of offending he had in front of him.”