British pedophile Richard Huckle has been given 22 life sentences after he pleaded guilty to 71 charges of sex abuse against children in Malaysia and Cambodia aged from six months to 12 years old.
The police believe that Huckle abused up to 200 children from mainly poor communities. He published the images on a blog on the dark web, an area of the Internet not easily accessible to the general user.
The 30-year-old man was handed 22 life sentences by Judge Peter Rook after he pleaded guilty to 71 counts of child sex offences. Rook said Huckle's sentence reflected the "public abhorrence" over his "campaign of rape".
In an interview with BBC, 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 has already spent 488 days in jail and hence he would have to face at least 23 years more in jail after which a parole board can consider his release.
After the sentencing, as Huckle was being taken away, a woman in the public gallery shouted. "A thousand deaths is too good for you".
When Huckle was arrested at Gatwick Airport in 2014, he was found with over 20,000 indecent images on his computer and camera. More than 1,000 of those pictures showed him committing crimes including rape of children. It also contained a ledger which had a detailed note on the abuse of 191 victims.
In spite of it, the police were unable to press charges on all cases as there was no photographic evidence of all the crimes.
Huckle wrote a 60-page online manual as an advice to other pedophiles on how to abuse children.
Rook read a quote from the 60-page pedophile manual in which Huckle said: "Impoverished kids are definitely much easier to seduce than middle-class Western kids".
Rook said: "It is a truly evil document that speaks volumes about the scale of your delusion. Relentlessly, you preyed upon the very young – pre-pubescent vulnerable children from a minority ethnic community into which you ingratiated yourself."
James Traynor from the National Crime Agency's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center told CNN: "He deliberately traveled to a part of the world where he thought he could abuse vulnerable children without being caught."
"Borders are no barrier -- we are determined that those who go abroad to abuse children will be held to account," he added.
