By any measure, the story of prolific paedophile Richard Huckle is extraordinary and not what you might expect.

He is a middle-class, church-going, grammar school boy who used a short-course teaching certificate to gain access to vulnerable children in a foreign community where many worshipped him and still refuse to believe what he did.

He raped babies, toddlers and pre-teens, girls and boys, some of them systematically over many years. His youngest victim was six months old.

He filmed and photographed much of the abuse and shared it with fellow paedophiles on the dark web.

He posted commentaries such as this alongside the images: "It's quite amazing to have stuck with the same child lover for so many years and I hope, from the images you have seen, enjoyed watching her grow.

"It's not often in child porn you can compare the bodies of a 5yo and a 12yo that are the same girl. I'm sure I'll have plenty more sex with (her) in the future."

Investigators found 20,253 "indecent photographs" on his computer, but "indecent" hardly does justice to his camerawork.

He photographed himself raping a three-year girl and used the image to raise money on a warped crowd-funding website.

Among other images found there were 249 involving a young girl and a bottle.

He also wrote a paedophiles' handbook to advise other perverts on how to operate and avoid detection.

The catalogue of his crimes reads like a lifetime's work, but Huckle has only just turned 30.

His friend Scott Chapman - who was at school with him in Folkestone, Kent, 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 I showed Mr Chapman the charges his friend had admitted he was briefly speechless, 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."

Huckle was baptised in Ashford, Kent, at 17, and later visited Christian churches with a particular ethnic congregation in London, where he helped out at Sunday schools.

He left school with average exam results and agonised over a career before taking a gap year in Malaysia.

He spent three months on a placement at a Christian church in the same poor, ethnic community he had befriended in the UK and then returned regularly to Malaysia offering to help teach at schools and churches.

For legal reasons, we can't reveal which community or churches he was involved with.

In 2008 he took a short English teacher training course at the British Council's offices in Kuala Lumpur, where he appeared in a promotional video.

He used religion and teaching as cover for his secret life of child sex abuse, sometimes employed for private tuition in his victims' homes in an impoverished area of the city.

The British Council said it had reviewed its association with Huckle, but that vetting its graduates was the responsibility of future employers.

Sharmila Sekaran, of the child protection charity Voice of the Children, said: "Someone like Richard Huckle, who is an Englishman, he's intelligent - the community thinks he's coming to do us a favour, therefore we have to go out of our way to make him comfortable, and when children start saying things - we don't know that they raised an alarm, but if they did then very likely they would not have been believed over him."

"Generally in Malaysia we don't think and believe that things like this can happen. Perhaps it is a belief that this is more of a western problem - we don't think it can happen in our own back yard."

Huckle was exposed when Australian police stumbled across his online paedophile activity during an investigation into other suspects.

It alerted the UK authorities in "late 2014," according to the National Crime Agency.

The NCA arrested him when he flew into Gatwick Airport in December 2014. Investigators found more than 20,000 indecent images on his computer and went on to uncover much more.

Huckle spent only a few days on bail before he was re-arrested, messaging his best friend from prison: "Life as I know it is over. This arrest has broken so many hearts."

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