Australian sentenced to 129 years for child sex abuse in Philippines

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An Australian man has been sentenced to 129 years in a Philippine jail as part of a child sexual abuse case involving victims as young as 18 months, a prosecutor announced on Wednesday.

"I hope this sends a very strong message to all abusers, all human traffickers, that crime really does not pay," Merlynn Barola-Uy, a regional prosecutor in the southern city of Cagayan de Oro, told AFP. 

This would mark the second time Peter Gerald Scully gets a conviction, as he is already serving a life sentence for rape and trafficking girls. 

The Philippines has become a global hotspot for child sex exploitation, experts warn, facilitated by the poverty situation, English fluency, and high internet connectivity in the country. 

The sentence was handed to Scully on November 3 by the Cagayan de Oro court after three others who were also accused entered into a plea bargain agreement - the group was charged on the account of 60 offenses, including trafficking, child porn, child abuse, and rape. 

The narrative took an Epstein-esque turn, as Lovely Margallo, Scully's girlfriend, was also sentenced to 126 years in jail, whereas the two others were given over 9 years.  

In 2015, Philippine authorities discovered the skeletons of a 10-year-old girl who was believed to have been kidnapped by Scully in 2013. The authorities learned of Scully's notorious abuses from his former partner at the time, Carme Ann Alvarez, who accused Scully of assaulting and raping young girls while recording them. Alvarez was one of the girls he abused before becoming his live-in partner and aiding him in trafficking children.

Not only was Scully arrested after a 3-week stakeout by the NBI’s Anti Human Trafficking Division, but he was also under investigation by Dutch police for broadcasting his videos to the Netherlands.