Paedophile Radio 1 DJ Chris Denning dies in prison, aged 81

Denning was serving two 13-year sentences after being convicted of sex offences against boys as young as nine years old.

He was being held at HMP Bedford, and died at nearby Bedford Hospital.

He had been in prison since 2014, when he was convicted at Southwark Crown Court of 40 offences against 24 boys aged between nine and 16. He was sentenced to 13 years.

He admitted to abusing another 11 boys in 2016 and was sentenced to another 13 years.

Denning was one of the founding DJs on BBC Radio 1, but in the 1970s he was exposed as a sex offender and convicted of gross indecency in 1974.

In 1988, he was imprisoned for three years for indecent assault and possessing indecent images.

It was later revealed he was already a convicted sex offender in Europe before ever making a name for himself in the UK, having been prosecuted in Germany in 1959 for circulating pornographic images.

In the late 1990s, Denning relocated to Prague, where he was accused of running a paedophile ring and photographed himself abusing boys. He was convicted of abusing boys under 15 and imprisoned.

Following his prison sentence in Prague, Denning went on the run, but was eventually tracked down in Austria and deported to England, where he admitted to five charges of abusing boys under 16 and was imprisoned for a further four years.

Denning was then extradited to Slovakia, where he was sentenced to a further five years for producing indecent images of children.

A report into his death found that "when clinical readings first showed that Mr Denning needed emergency care, he was not transferred to hospital for treatment".

"This area of care was not equivalent to that which Mr Denning could have expected to receive in the community," the report summarised.