More than 20 women have contacted police to say they may have been raped by Zhenhao Zou, the Chinese PhD student, detectives believe may be one of the UKs most prolific sex offenders.
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00:00Just after Zhao was found guilty at the inner London, Crown Court had drugging and raping
00:08ten women in both London and China. The Metropolitan Police launched an appeal for more potential
00:17victims to come forward. Jurors in his trial at the inner London Crown Court were told
00:23Zhao filmed his attacks as quote on quote souvenirs and kept a trophy box of women's
00:30belongings. There were also at the time 50 videos that were identified as further potential victims
00:40of Zhu's awful crimes. Police ultimately believe more than 50 other women may have fallen prey
00:47to the engineering student, which would make him one of the worst sex offenders the UK has
00:55ever seen. He had also been a student at Queen's University Belfast where he studied
01:01mechanical engineering. It's including other forces and indeed other jurisdictions.
01:07So as you may be aware, Zhao committed some of his offences here in the United Kingdom
01:12but also in China and in other parts of the world. We have victims and survivors who've
01:17contacted us from both England and China and from other jurisdictions as well and this is
01:22an international enquiry where we're liaising with victim survivors from across the globe
01:26to try to understand exactly what he may have done, when, where and to who, so we can bring
01:30him to justice for all of those crimes. We'll be working with each and every one of those
01:33individuals who's made contact with us and my thanks and heart goes out to them because
01:37ultimately they found the courage and the confidence to reach out to us, which is what
01:41we're always hoping for, but we'll now need to work with them, visit them perhaps wherever they
01:45are and understand exactly what may have happened to them. We can understand what crimes may have
01:49occurred and then of course we'll discuss that with the Crime Prosecution Service and if necessary
01:53bring further charges against Mr Zhao. We have victims reaching out to us from different parts
01:58of the globe at the moment. The primary places where we believe offending may have occurred at
02:03this time appears to be both in England here in London and over in China. We haven't had any
02:09victim survivors yet report an offence in Belfast but we're open-minded about the fact that given
02:14how active and prolific Zhao appears to have been with his awful offending, there's every prospect
02:18that he could have offended anywhere in the world, so we wouldn't want anyone to write off the fact
02:23they may have been a victim of his behaviour simply by virtue of the fact that from a certain place.