Abdul Elahi: Sexual blackmailer jailed for 32 years

An online blackmailer who carried out "sickening" and "abhorrent" sexual abuse has been sentenced to 32 years in prison.

Abdul Elahi targeted almost 2,000 victims to amass images of degrading sexual acts before selling the images to paedophiles.

In some cases, women were blackmailed into abusing a baby or a sibling, with Elahi offering to pay off their debts.

He admitted 158 charges committed against 72 complainants.

He will also be subject to an eight-year extension to his normal licence period following his eventual release.

During sentencing at Birmingham Crown Court, he was described as being "in a league of his own" in terms of the scale of his online offending.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) described Elahi's abuse as some of the most "sickening sexual offending" it had ever investigated.

His victims ranged in age from eight-month-old babies to adults, it said.

Sentencing him, Judge Sarah Buckingham described the 26-year-old, formerly of Sparkhill in Birmingham, as the "very worst type of predatory offender ever identified thus far".

The court heard more than 67,000 indecent images of children had been recovered from hard drives, with victims spread across 30 or more different countries.

"There is no conceivable way of tracing and destroying all the material you have spread online, causing ongoing distress to your victims," the judge said.

"The abhorrent nature of your crimes warrants an extremely long sentence for the protection of the public."

'Box sets' of abuse

At the start of the sentencing hearing on Wednesday, the court heard Elahi used fake personas, including those of a doctor or a wealthy stockbroker, offering financial assistance and promising to pay off debts with Bitcoin, before persuading people to send him explicit photographs.

So-called "box sets" of abusive images and videos compiled by Elahi were distributed in vast quantities, the court heard, after girls and young adults were blackmailed into providing ever more humiliating and degrading sexual material.

"Your demands increased in their viciousness, their depravity, even when your victims begged for mercy," the judge told Elahi.

"Even when you knew they were suicidal, you laughed at their distress and pain."

Abdul Elahi's sentencing hearing at Birmingham Crown Court took three days

A series of impact statements were read to the court including that of one victim, a schoolgirl at the time of the offences.

She described trying to take an overdose after learning Elahi had uploaded her images to Twitter.

"I would say for two years this person has ruined my life, I was heartbroken. I remember my 16th birthday, I spent the night crying, I was severely depressed.

"I am trying to move on but I find it very hard, I feel that this will be with me for the rest of my life."

Another teenage victim described feeling "shaken to my soul and completely horrified that I was a part of this".

Tony Cook of the NCA said: "Abdul Elahi is a depraved sadist who got sexual gratification through power and control over his victims whom he often goaded to the point of wanting to kill themselves.

"He has wrecked lives and families."

About 550 women and female children in Britain are believed to have been targeted by Elahi, who sold one customer more than 1,000 hours of videos.

Removing online images

The court heard he regarded his crimes as a job. In interviews after his arrest he admitted to "trying to make as much money" as he possibly could.

The Revenge Porn Helpline said it had been working with the NCA to remove the online content for more than two and a half years and had removed 135,000 individual images.

"We hope that every person affected by this feels some small sense of closure today, we know that their priority is the removal of this content," said Sophie Mortimer, from the charity.

Kirsty Nicholls admitted working with Elahi to make indecent images of a child and also sexually assaulting a child

Co-defendant Kirsty Nicholls, 35, of Northolt, west London, who admitted working with Elahi to make indecent images of a child, was jailed for six years and nine months.

Nicholls met Elahi on a so-called sugar daddy website, targeting financially desperate women.

"You committed these offences with Elahi - your offending was motivated entirely by financial gain," the judge told Nicholls.

"The offences are so serious that only an immediate sentence of custody can follow."