In a landmark sentencing, a 29-year-old Perth man, Muhammad Zain Ul Abideen Rasheed, has been handed a 17-year prison sentence for 665 offences in what is considered Australia’s most prolific case of online sexual abuse.
It is reported that Rasheed, who operated from his bedroom in his family home, targeted 286 young girls across 20 countries, using deception and blackmail to force them into performing sexual acts on camera.
Over the course of two days, the District Court of Western Australia heard how Rasheed posed as a 15-year-old YouTube star to lure his victims, who were mostly teenagers, some as young as 10 years old.
Rasheed’s crimes, spanned an 11-month period from late 2018, were described by Judge Amanda Burrows as “abhorrent,” “cruel,” “humiliating,” and “no comparable case … I can find in Australia.”
“The victims will forever live with the fear that the recordings you made of them will be [further] disseminated,” Judge Burrows said.
Rasheed’s modus operandi involved gaining the trust of his victims before escalating to sexually explicit demands. If they resisted, he would blackmail them by threatening to share doctored images and videos with their friends and family.
It was reported that in some cases, Rasheed broadcasted the abuse to other paedophiles, amplifying the trauma inflicted on his victims. The scale of his crimes required almost three days for sentencing, a reflection of the unprecedented nature of his offences in Australia.
Assistant Commissioner David McLean of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) labelled the case as “one of the worst sextortion cases in history,” emphasising the global reach of Rasheed’s predatory behaviour.
The AFP, in coordination with the United States’ Homeland Security Investigations, Interpol, and law enforcement agencies from several other countries, uncovered the full extent of Rasheed’s crimes.
Rasheed is already serving a five-year jail term for a separate crime in which he sexually abused a 14-year-old child in his car on two separate occasions at a Perth park, which the judge noted was during the same period he was committing the online offences.
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