A Chinese student who was convicted of drugging and raping 10 women in London and in his home country was given a life sentence on Thursday in a case that a senior British police officer said had uncovered “one of the most prolific predators we’ve ever encountered.”
The student, Zou Zhenhao, 28, was convicted of attacks committed in Britain and China from September 2019 to May 2023, but investigators said they had identified 50 further potential victims in videos he recorded using cameras inside his homes.
Originally from Dongguan, in the Guangdong Province of southeastern China, Mr. Zou was studying mechanical engineering at University College London at the time of the rapes. He targeted women he met through the student community, as well as by using social media and dating websites.
Handing Mr. Zou a life sentence with a minimum term of 24 years before he can be considered for release, Judge Rosina Cottage said he had leveraged his academic status to select potential targets and to “groom women to feel safe.”
The senior police officer who oversaw the investigation, Kevin Southworth, a commander in the Metropolitan Police in London, said that because Mr. Zou had incapacitated women with a cocktail of drugs that also affected memory, some other victims may have “no idea what’s happened to them.”
“The sad fact of it is that there may well be some women on those videos who we may never identify, either because the images are too poor or we just can’t find them wherever they are in the world,” he said in an interview with The New York Times this week.
Mr. Zou had a fixed modus operandi, Mr. Southworth said, where he would engineer social situations that would result in women visiting one of his two luxury London flats. He would then spike their drinks using a concoction of drugs that would render them physically incapacitated and sometimes unconscious.
Using a combination of hidden cameras and mobile phones, Mr. Zou then filmed himself raping and sexually assaulting the women, and he also kept items of their jewelry and clothing. Some of the attacks were committed only days apart.
Mr. Southworth said that Mr. Zou had raped women in an “industrial manner.”
Seven of the 10 women Mr. Zou was jailed for raping were attacked in China, during visits to his home country in 2022 and 2023; two were assaulted in a flat in Bloomsbury, central London, in 2019 or 2020; and one in Mr. Zou’s most recent London residence, in Elephant and Castle, in the central part of the city, in May 2023.
It was the victim of the last attack who first reported him to the police, but she did not know Mr. Zou’s name or address. After she posted a warning to other women on social media, another victim recognized the description of the attacker from her own experience in 2021 — and she had Mr. Zou’s name, address and phone number.
When police officers arrested him in January 2024, they realized the scale of his offending. A search of his home uncovered drugs including butanediol and ketamine, hidden cameras, and several laptops and mobile phones, which contained the videos Mr. Zou recorded of his attacks.
Mr. Zou came from a wealthy family in Dongguan, and he said during the trial that his father worked “in a state-owned enterprise.”
Mr. Zou studied at Queen’s University Belfast from 2017 to 2019, then moved to London in September that year to do a master’s degree and then a doctorate. He flaunted the “trappings of wealth” including wearing a Rolex watch, Mr. Southworth said.
Mr. Southworth said that Mr. Zou had used his real name and picture on dating and social media profiles, where he “did his best to make himself look like an eligible dating partner.”
Investigators say that by convincing women to visit his home voluntarily before attacking them, and then using alcohol as a carrier for drugs which would affect their memory, Mr. Zou tried to minimize the chance that his victims would feel able to go to the police — or be believed if they did.
“I think he is someone who is arrogant enough to believe they could get away with this,” Mr. Southworth said. “And of course he did, sadly, carry on his campaign of sexual violence for some time.”
Mr. Zou was convicted of 11 counts of rape against 10 women, as well as three counts of voyeurism, 12 counts of possession of extreme pornographic images, one of false imprisonment and eight of possession of drugs with intent to commit a sexual offense.
Two victims gave evidence at the trial, and 23 other women who believe they were attacked by Mr. Zou have so far responded to an appeal launched by the Metropolitan Police when he was convicted in March.
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