British man charged with child sex abuse in Bulgaria

A British man convicted in the UK of child pornography offences was charged Friday with sexually abusing minors in a poor minority Roma community in central Bulgaria, prosecutors said.

They said Daniel Erickson-Hull, 44, was detained Thursday in a Roma neighbourhood in the town of Sliven, where he lived as a self-proclaimed evangelical preacher.

He is charged with abusing four boys under the age of 16, the regional prosecutors' office said in a statement.

"The charges... are for sexual abuse between January and September 2019," the office's spokeswoman Vanya Beleva told AFP.

Television pictures showed a small crowd of Roma people from the man's self-styled congregation gathered outside the Sliven regional court on Friday to protest against his detention.

The charges followed a BBC report, broadcast earlier this week, on sex offenders fleeing abroad.

The programme revealed that Erickson-Hull breached his court orders by spending time near unaccompanied children and by failing to report