Roderick Macdonald outside the Maltese courts earlier this month. Photo: Matthew Xuereb

The British paedophile jailed for child pornography and set to be extradited to the UK over a girl’s sexual assault is also wanted for child rape in New Zealand.

New Zealand court documents seen by this newspaper show that 76-year-old Roderick Macdonald has been on the run from New Zealand police since 2010.

He is wanted for allegedly raping a girl younger than 12 three times in South New Zealand back in 2008.

Two weeks ago he was arrested near his flat at Ta’ Ċenċ, Gozo, and taken into custody for breaching the conditions of a suspended sentence over the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl in the UK.

He then received an 18-month jail term for possession of child pornography, which was found in the ‘deleted’ folder on his laptop computer.

Mr Macdonald has consented to be extradited to the UK to serve time over the assault. It is not yet known whether he will choose to serve the 18 months in the UK or be extradited after doing his jail time in Malta.

How would he know about any of the McCann stuff?

Scotland Yard police also want to question him on a paedophile ring suspected of involvement in the disappearance of English girl Madeline McCann.

The three-year-old’s disappearance shocked the international community when she vanished from her parent’s holiday apartment in Portugal back in 2007.

Police were ­investigating 18 possible linked break-ins at Algarve villas by a lone intruder from 2004 to 2010. The break-ins had stopped in 2010, at around the time Mr Macdonald was deported from Portugal to Australia for raping another eight-year-old girl there.

Mr Macdonald was living in Portugal’s Algarve region at the time of the McCann disappearance, on a boat a few miles from her family’s apartment.

A friend of Mr Macdonald, however, is insisting the convict has no knowledge of the McCann case or of any paedophile gangs.

“This is ridiculous. How would [he] know about any of that stuff?” the friend asked.

Mr Macdonald, a former oil rig worker whose mother is Maltese, is claiming to have come to Gozo two years ago for “personal reasons” and is denying all allegations against him. He has not always gone by the name Macdonald and for many years used the alias Roderick Robinson.

His friend however said this was the man’s original family name and not a false identity.

One thing is certain: the man has a long history of running from the law over child sex abuse allegations.

In 1989 he faced a charge in Australia of raping an eight-year-old girl and fled to the UK. He was found guilty of sexually assaulting two girls aged five and seven in Brighton in 2010.

Again he fled, this time to Thailand, where he lay low for a while. Three months later, however, he was deported back to Britain after Thai authorities found out about his past.

He eventually found his way to New Zealand, where he was living in a government-owned retirement home.

Auckland newspapers had, at the time, reported that the man had “disappeared overnight” following weeks of “strange behaviour” and police investigations.

He then allegedly raped a girl three times on her parent’s boat, twice in one day. He was charged in court but fled once again.

Rumours spread in New Zealand that he had sailed to Fiji but instead the man cropped up in a nondescript road in rural Gozo.