SOFIA, Sept 13 — A British man convicted in the UK of child pornography offences was charged today with sexually abusing minors in a poor minority Roma community in central Bulgaria, prosecutors said.

They said Daniel Erickson-Hull, 44, was detained yesterday 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 today 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 to police in his home country.

He had been sentenced in Britain for downloading hundreds of indecent images of children. — AFP