A convicted pedophile has been found dead in his cell in a prison in northern England. As the authorities said on Monday, Richard Huckle died the previous day in custody.
Apparently stabbed a fellow inmate the 33-year-olds with a homemade knives, as reported, inter alia, the BBC. A spokesman for the prison did not provide information on the cause of death and referred to the ongoing police investigations.
In 2016, Huckle was sentenced to life imprisonment by a London court in 71 cases for sexual assault and rape of children in 71 cases. He should spend at least 23 years behind bars.
His youngest victim is said to have been six months, the oldest twelve years old. Huckle had ambushed children in a poor neighborhood in Kuala Lumpur, and volunteered in Malaysia's capital city from 2006 to 2014. He pretended to be a photographer, an English teacher and a philanthropist to win the trust of the children's families in poverty.
"Glad he was punished"
When Huckle traveled to the UK for Christmas 2014, the police arrested him. The authorities found more than 20,000 images of children on his computer and camera, and about a thousand of them showed Huckle committing serious sexual offenses. Among other things, he recorded rape and shared these images over the Internet with other pedophiles.
The Malaysian child protection organization Protect and Save the Children (PSC), which supports victims of sexual assault in Kuala Lumpur, expressed disappointment at the news of Huckle's death. "People were happy that he was punished for his crimes," said PSC chief Mariza Abdulkadir, "but now that's been taken away."
The police believe Huckle has done much more in Malaysia but has not been able to prove it. He was convicted for the sexual abuse of 23 Malaysian and Cambodian children.
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