More than 20 women have come forward after police launched an international appeal for potential victims of one of the UK’s worst serial rapists.
Zhenhao Zou, 28, was found guilty last month of drugging, raping and filming 10 women – but detectives said he may have attacked up to 60 more.
Met Police commander Kevin Southworth said: ‘Given how prolific Zou seems to have been, there is every potential he could be one of the most prolific offenders that we’ve ever seen in this space.’
He added that 23 women have contacted them saying they may have been targeted, with work now underway to identify victims and ‘bring Zou to justice for the full extent of his crimes’.
Mr Southworth said: ‘We have victims reaching out to us from different parts of the globe.
‘At the moment, the primary places where we believe offending may have occurred at this time appears to be both in England, here in London, and over in China.
‘Given how active and prolific Zou appears to have been with his awful offending, there is every prospect that he could have offended anywhere in the world.’
Zou used hidden or handheld cameras to record the attacks, keeping the footage and sometimes the belongings of the women as souvenirs in a ‘trophy box’.
The footage showed four attacks on three victims in London, where he studied for a masters and PhD in mechanical engineering at University College from 2019 to 2023.
Two of the women were identified and gave evidence at his trial. Another was raped twice but has never been identified.
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Videos showed seven more women being attacked in China, where the wealthy Communist official’s son returned home during the pandemic. They were never found.
Met police checked 1,270 videos and 9million messages, and hope to help dozens more victims.
Mr Southworth said: ‘We are still working to identify all of those women in those videos.
‘We have now, thankfully, had 23 victim survivors come forward through the appeal that we’ve conducted, some of whom may be identical with some of the females that we saw in those videos, some of whom may even turn out to be from the original indicted cases.’
The team of detectives needed to look at Zou’s potential crimes will have to increase and ‘more resources’ will be put into the investigation.
Mr Southworth added: ‘Ultimately, now it’s the investigation team’s job to professionally pick our way through those individual pieces of evidence, those individual victims’ stories, to see if we can identify who may have been a victim, when and where, so then we can bring Zou to justice for the full extent of his crimes.’
Zou lived in a student flat in Woburn Place, near Russell Square in central London, and later in a flat in the Uncle building in Churchyard Row in Elephant and Castle, south London.
He had also been a student at Queen’s University Belfast, where he studied mechanical engineering from 2017 until 2019.
His crimes were discovered in November 2023 when one victim – a Chinese national – told police he dragged her into a bedroom during a party at his flat, made her drink vodka spiked with drugs and raped her as she screamed.
The other victim identified said she was with Zou and friends in Chinatown in 2021. Her last memory before being raped in his flat was being sick in the street.
Jurors were visibly upset as they had to watch footage of nine of the rapes during his four-week trial at Inner London crown court.
In what will be a delicate situation, Mr Southworth said officers are waiting to hear from potential victims with a view to ‘supporting and understanding’ what has happened.
He said the detectives are looking to understand ‘what may have happened without wishing to revisit the trauma, but in a way that enables (the potential victims) to give evidence in the best possible way’.
The Metropolitan Police is appealing to anyone who thinks they may have been targeted by Zou to contact the force either by emailing survivors@met.police.uk, or via the major incident public portal on the force’s website.
Zou will be sentenced on June 19.
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