Abdul Elahi: Sexual blackmailer jailed for 40 yearson December 10, 2021 at 4:46 pm

An online blackmailer who carried out “sickening” and “abhorrent” sexual abuse has been sentenced to 40 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.

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.

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.”

At the start of the sentencing hearing on Wednesday the court heard Elahi used fake personas, including that of a wealthy stockbroker offering financial assistance before persuading people to send him explicit photographs for money.

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 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.”

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