A British man jailed for numerous sex crimes against Malaysian children has been found stabbed to death in prison.
Richard Huckle, 33, from Ashford, Kent, abused as many as 200 children.
In 2016, he was given 22 life sentences after admitting 71 charges of sex abuse of children aged between six months and 12 years, between 2006 and 2014.
It is understood he was attacked on Sunday in his cell at Full Sutton Prison, near York, with what was described as a makeshift knife.
Police were called shortly after 12:30pm and have launched an investigation into his death, which they are treating as suspicious.
Huckle’s trial at the Old Bailey in 2016 heard that investigators who checked his computer found more than 20,000 indecent pictures and videos of his assaults.
These were shared with paedophiles worldwide through a hidden website on the so-called dark web.
Huckle, who worked as a freelance photographer, tried to make a business out of his abuse by crowd-funding the release of the images. He was compiling a paedophile’s manual at the time of his arrest in 2014.
At the end of his trial, Judge Peter Rook said Huckle’s sentence reflected the “public abhorrence” over his “campaign of rape”.
He said: “It is very rare indeed that a judge has to sentence sexual offending by one person on such a scale as this.”
Huckle was arrested at Gatwick Airport by National Crime Agency officials in December 2014, following a tip-off by Australian authorities.
He presented himself as a practising Christian and first visited Malaysia on a teaching gap year when he was 18 or 19.
He went on to groom children while doing voluntary work.
In online posts, Huckle had bragged: “Impoverished kids are definitely much easier to seduce than middle-class Western kids.”
Commenting on one of his victims, he boasted: “I’d hit the jackpot, a 3yo girl as loyal to me as my dog and nobody seemed to care.”
Huckle’s encrypted paedophile manual was found on his laptop ready for publication on the dark web.
Last year, BBC Three produced a documentary about Huckle, which explored his proximity to children in Cambodia, India and the UK.
- Malaysians deplore ‘devil’ Huckle
- The ‘gap year’ paedophile Richard Huckle ‘highly likely’ to have had UK victims
In it, retired police officer Jim Gamble, who used to lead child abuse investigations in Britain, called for a more extensive investigation into potential abuses in the UK.
Full Sutton is a maximum security men’s prison around 11 miles east of York that holds “some of the most difficult and dangerous criminals in the country“, according to the Ministry of Justice website.
Residents have protested against plans to expand Full Sutton
It has a total capacity of around 550, and holds only Category A prisoners, whose escape would be considered highly dangerous, and Category B prisoners, whose escape must be made “very difficult”.
Last August one hundred officers were called when a prisoner went on a rampage, attacking staff and starting a fire.
Plans to build a Category C facility alongside the current facilities, making a 1,440-inmate “mega prison”, have been opposed by Humberside Police, who fear it would increase violent crime within the jail and raise demands on the force.
www.bbc.com
