London, June 6 (IANS) A British man who abused up to 200 Malaysian children and posted videos of his depraved acts on the 'dark web', was sentenced to 22 life sentences on Monday after admitting to 71 charges of sex abuse.
Freelance photographer Richard Huckle, 30, from Ashford, Kent, admitted the offences against victims aged between six months and 12 years, from 2006 to 2014, BBC reported.
Sentencing Huckle, Judge Peter Rook at the Old Bailey said, "It is very rare indeed that a judge has to sentence sexual offending by one person on such a scale as this."
It is believed Huckle, who masqueraded as a devout Christian, philanthropist and English teacher to prey on poor Christian children in Kuala Lumpur over nine years, abused up to 200 children from mainly poor communities in the Malaysian capital.
The judge said Huckle was consumed by and obsessed with his own sexual gratification and his "campaign of rape" was of "deep concern".
"In my view, you may well harbour feelings of regret but there is no feeling of genuine remorse in this case," he added.
His trial began on June 1.
Huckle was arrested at Gatwick airport by National Crime Agency officials in December 2014.
He first visited Malaysia on a teaching gap year when he was 18 or 19.
Investigators found more than 20,000 indecent pictures and videos of his assaults on children, which were shared with paedophiles worldwide through the now-defunct dark web site TLZ - The Love Zone, hidden in the dark web -- part of the World Wide Web that is not indexed by traditional search engines.
He even tried to make a business out of his abuse by crowd-funding the release of the images and was compiling a paedophile's manual called "Paedophiles And Poverty: Child Lover Guide" at the time of his arrest by the National Crime Agency.
He boasted about his crimes in online posts, saying in one discussion that "impoverished kids are definitely much easier to seduce than middle-class Western kids".
Ahead of his sentencing, Huckle claimed to a psychiatrist that he wanted to put his "madness" behind him and settle down with a south Indian woman.
But the court was shown a posting from 2013 in which he outlined his plan to marry one of his victims in order to help him abuse more children.
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