Paedophile Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins has been murdered in Wakefield Prison, where he was serving a 29-year sentence for child sex offences. The 48-year-old former frontman reportedly had his throat cut by a fellow inmate after prisoners were released from their cells on Saturday morning. Emergency services attended but he was pronounced dead at the scene.
West Yorkshire Police have launched a murder investigation. Two men, aged 25 and 43, have been arrested on suspicion of murder and remain in custody. A police spokesman said officers were called at 9.39am to reports of a serious assault on a prisoner. The Prison Service confirmed the incident but declined to comment further while police investigate.
Watkins was one of the highest-profile prisoners to be killed in a British jail. In 2013, he was convicted at Cardiff Crown Court of engaging in sexual activity with a child and the attempted rape of an 11-month-old baby, along with 11 other offences. His co-defendants, known as Mother A and Mother B, were sentenced to 14 and 17 years respectively.
The court heard how Watkins encouraged a fan to abuse her own child and attempted to rape another fan's baby girl. His collection of child abuse material totalled 27 terabytes of data, dwarfing South Wales Police's storage capacity. Experts from GCHQ were brought in to crack encrypted files on his computer. Watkins initially denied the charges but changed his plea to guilty at the last moment, with his defence citing crack cocaine and crystal meth use as a reason for his lack of memory.
