Police want to question Roderick Macdonald about possible paedophile rings operating in Portugal when three-year-old Brit Madeleine McCann disappeared in 2007. Photo: PAA convicted British paedophile, 76, who has been living in Gozo, is to be extradited to the UK to serve time over the sexual assault of two girls aged five and seven.
Roderick Macdonald had been issued with a European Arrest Warrant in April last year by Lewes Crown Court in East Sussex, after he broke the terms of a suspended sentence for assaulting the two girls in 2012.
On Monday, Mr Macdonald, who was born in Aldershot, was arrested in Gozo where he was living in a Ta’ Ċenċ apartment. He appeared in court before Magistrate Audrey Demicoli yesterday and consented to an extradition request from the UK judicial authorities.
According to UK newspapers Daily Mail and the Mirror, British police believe Mr Macdonald, who also went by the name of Roderick Robinson, could give information on a paedophile ring linked to the abduction of English girl Madeleine McCann.
Madeleine has been missing since May 2007, when she was three years old. She disappeared during a family holiday in Portugal while her parents Gerry and Kate were at a nearby restaurant.
He appeared in and consented to an extradition request from the UK judicial authorities
In May the Mirror reported Mr Macdonald was in the Algarve region when Madeline vanished.
Scotland Yard detectives chasing new leads in Praia da Luz, where the girl went missing, want to question him about paedophile rings in the area at the time.
Police were investigating 18, possibly linked, break-ins at Algarve villas by a lone intruder from 2004 to 2010.
The attacks stopped around the time that Mr Macdonald was deported from Portugal to Australia, where he was wanted for raping an eight-year-old girl in 1998, the Mirror reported.
Within weeks of his release the former oil rig worker fled to Thailand but, three months later, he was deported back to Britain after Thai authorities found out about his past.
He moved to Brighton and was made to sign the sex offenders register but, in 2012, he was given a one-year jail term suspended for two years for abusing girls aged five and seven in the seaside town.
“They had been visiting their father on his yacht at a boat yard where Robinson also owned a vessel. He called himself ‘Captain Rod’ and became friendly with the girl’s father,” the Mirror reported.
It was believed he escaped to the Far East during the operative period of his suspended sentence, breaching the court’s orders.
Police Inspector Mario Cuschieri prosecuted.