A 36-year-old man convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting 48 young men in Manchester, and videotaping and cataloging the rapes, was sentenced on Monday to life in prison.
Tagged “the most prolific rapist ever tried in a British court,” Reynhard Sinaga, was found guilty of carrying out a two-and-a-half year campaign in which he approached scores of drunk young men outside Manchester clubs and lured them back to his nearby apartment under the guise of giving them a place to sleep or recharge their phones.
Instead, he gave them drinks spiked with sedatives, prosecutors said, before raping them, sometimes for hours.
Mr. Sinaga committed the rapes without anyone noticing until a June morning in 2017 when an 18-year-old man woke up in the middle of being assaulted.
The man beat up Mr. Sinaga and escaped with his attacker’s white iPhone. On Mr. Sinaga’s digital devices, investigators said they eventually found huge volumes of photos and videos of his assaults, sometimes cataloged alongside pictures of a victim’s ID card.
In most cases, prosecutors said, the victims did not know exactly what had happened to them until getting a visit from the police. Investigators found evidence of Mr. Sinaga assaulting more than 190 victims in all.
Born and raised in Indonesia, Mr. Sinaga came to Britain in 2007 on a student visa. He studied for a master’s degree at Manchester University in sociology, and then began studying for a doctorate in human geography in 2012 at Leeds University.
