A MAN who lived on both sides of the Border has been jailed for 24 years in Belfast for raping and sexually abusing young girls.
Handing the jail term down to Jason King (38), at Belfast Crown Court, Mr Justice Gillen told the Newtownards man he considered his case "probably to be the worst instance of multiple child abuse that I have come across".
Following two trials, King, from Balfour Street in Ards, was convicted of 58 counts involving rape, buggery, indecent assault, gross indecency, inflicting actual bodily harm and taking videos of himself having sex with two of the girls.
He groomed the schoolgirls, aged as young as 12 and up to 15, plying them with alcohol and cigarettes before abusing and raping them.
Originally from Co Down, King was brought up in Co Kildare and he returned North around 1986.
His crimes included nine rapes, eight buggeries, eight acts of unlawful carnal knowledge, 25 indecent assaults, three acts of gross indecency and three of making indecent photographs of children. In total he abused nine girls, including two sisters, over a six-year period between 1996 and 2002, from when he was about 26, making two of them pregnant.
One girl he made pregnant suffered a miscarriage after he threw her down a set of stairs.
Mr Justice Gillen also ordered King to sign the police sex offenders' register for the rest of his life and barred him from ever working with children. He stipulated that in order to protect the public from King, believed to be at high risk of reoffending, he would be released on licence, the terms of which will be set by the secretary of state.
In a statement released to the media, Det Supt Karen Baxter welcomed the sentence and paid tribute to King's victims who came forward, saying, "These girls and women deserve to be congratulated for having the courage and determination to come forward and work with police right to the end." Mr Justice Gillen told King that his offending represented a "prolonged and appalling catalogue of sexual abuse against children over a long period, carried out deliberately and in a planned manner".
The judge said King "actively groomed children" before he abused them, many of whom were already vulnerable, and that his behaviour followed a definite pattern of him hanging about schools and other areas where children would have been found.
Mr Justice Gillen said that "not content with having defiled them", King showed them not one shed of remorse during the trial where, under his instructions, each victim was rigorously cross-examined and accused of lying and conspiring to make up stories in a desire for compensation.
"This case lacks the mitigation of a guilty plea," said the judge, telling King he would have been given considerable credit for sparing his victims "the humiliating and, in some instances, damaging ordeal of the prospect of the trial, going into the witness box and reliving their dreadful experiences".
Turning to the issue of sentence, Mr Justice Gillen said: "I have no doubt that you represent a real danger to young and vulnerable female children - you personify every parent's worst nightmare."
The judge said King must receive such a "very severe sentence" for a number of reasons including punishment and deterrence but also because "perhaps only the passing of years may dull your current voracious sexual appetite".