Ex-Army officer paid for girls to be abused on Skype
A FORMER Army officer paid paedophiles thousands of pounds to abuse children to order as he watched them over the internet.
Andrew Whiddett, 70, who was once chief of security at the British embassy in Iraq, also discussed visiting the Philippines to abuse underage girls.
Investigators found a cache of child abuse images on his computer after being alerted to 158 transactions he made to suspicious overseas accounts. Whiddett, a former lieutenant colonel who was appointed an MBE in 1988, faces jail after pleading guilty at Croydon Crown Court to six charges relating to the sexual abuse of children.
The father of three, from Portsmouth, was arrested at Heathrow in October 2017 by the National Crime Agency after he was flagged making payments to the Philippines. Whiddett told officers the money was to watch live adult sex shows. However, the NCA discovered that he had trawled the internet for child abuse images.
Investigators found a series of Skype video-call conversations that Whiddett had tried to delete. In them, he gave instructions to paedophiles to carry out abuse while he watched. In one incident, Whiddett urged a woman to abuse her nine-year-old daughter. He sent her £30.
In September 2016, Whiddett indicated to another woman that he wanted to sexually abuse a child during a visit to the Philippines the following month. He paid the woman a total of £8,584 for helping him indulge his twisted desires.
The NCA tipped off authorities in the Philippines after investigating Whiddett. It led to the arrest of one adult and the safeguarding of six children aged three to 14.
Whiddett admitted two offences relating to the livestreamed abuse of young girls, one of trying to facilitate abuse and three of making indecent photographs of a child.
Judge Nicholas Ainley told Whiddett, whose second wife Lani was in court, that he faces a jail sentence when he reappears on May 22. Whiddett attempted to prevent the
‘Attacks were soul-destroying’
Press publishing his photograph, claiming that to do so would put his safety in peril because of his military past.
But after a challenge by the Daily Mail, Judge Ainley said there was no ‘real and immediate risk’ to Whiddett’s safety.
Whiddett served in the Royal Corps of Signals and is understood to have worked with members of the Royal Family.
After leaving the Army in 1997, he worked in security in the Middle East. He was chief overseas security manager at the British embassy in Baghdad between 2006 and 2009 before returning to the UK.
NCA senior investigating officer Gary Fennelly said: ‘Whiddett was directly responsible for the soul- destroying abuse of children thousands of miles away from him.’