The man, Alladin Lanim, 40, was finally charged in Kuching on Aug 17 with sexually abusing dozens of children, aged from two to 16, in the state.
He pleaded guilty to 18 charges and was sentenced to a total of 48 years in prison and 15 strokes of the cane.
According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald today, specialist investigators from the Australian Federal Police (AFP), Queensland police and the Australian Transactions Reports and Analysis Centre (Austrac) played a key role in the arrest of Lanim, whose activities had gone undetected for 14 years.
Detective Sergeant Daniel Burnicle, the acting senior officer for the AFP in Kuala Lumpur, told the daily that Lanim had molested children at a plantation and a house in Lundu, Sarawak.
He said the accused induced children to watch pornographic material by letting them play games on his handphone.
It further said that Lanim boasted about his crimes in messaging forums and posted about his exploits on the Dark Web, alerting Australian police to place him under observation for two years.
He was listed in a multinational internal police report in 2019 and became one of the top 10 offenders in the world for exploitation of children on the internet.
But Burnicle said Lanim had been sharing child abuse materials on the web since 2007 and was eventually linked to more than 1,000 images and videos depicting sexual abuse of minors.
“He was so prolific, with so many victims. That’s why he became a high priority,” said Burnicle.
Initially, the police had nothing more on Lanim than his anonymous online profile. In August this year, experts at the Austrac’s victim identification unit finally made a breakthrough.
Burnicle said it was a slow, methodical process to look through images and locations. “It’s all very difficult with the Dark Web to track people.”
In July, Burnicle said the Australian probe team tracked him to a Covid-19 quarantine centre, where he was serving a mandatory isolation after arriving in Sarawak following a trip to Peninsular Malaysia.
He was finally arrested by Malaysian police on July 5, after his isolation was over, said the report.
Burnicle said Australian investigators, who provided materials to prosecutors in Kuching, identified 34 victims he had abused but believe there may have been more.
“This investigation was all, of course, done during Covid-19, which made it all the more difficult in terms of being able to get around the country and just conduct those basic field inquiries that you needed to do,” Burnicle was quoted as saying.