Almost half of the allegations from 2016 involved “one or more children”

UN staff have carried out thousands of rapes around the world, a former senior official has claimed.

Andrew MacLeod, who was chief of operations at the UN’s Emergency Co-ordination Centre, said that “predatory” abusers used development jobs to get to vulnerable women and children.

He estimated that 60,000 rapes had been carried out by UN staff in the past decade, with 3,300 paedophiles working in the organisation and its agencies.

“There are tens of thousands of aid workers around the world with paedophile tendencies, but if you wear a Unicef T-shirt nobody will ask what you’re up to,” he told The Sun.

“You have the impunity to do whatever you want. It is endemic across the aid industry across the world. The system is