Police have launched investigations to see if the culprit of a brutal rape in Salford for which an innocent man spent 17 years in prison perpetrated similar unsolved sex attacks in the city.
Paul Quinn was convicted on Friday for the rape of a young mother as she walked home in Little Hulton in the early hours of the morning on July 19 2003.
Andrew Malkinson, working as a security guard at a local shopping centre, protested his innocence but was wrongly picked out at an identity parade and jailed.
Now Quinn has been convicted, police are reviewing three unsolved stranger rapes dating from 2005 to 2010, two of which took place in Salford.
Detectives confirmed that they were looking at similar sex offences perpetrated in Swinton and Salford.
They are investigating another in Bolton and his time working at Lancaster University as a fence building contractor has prompted police to look at other offences there.
Credit: GMP.
Detective Chief Superintendent Rebecca McKendrick, from Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said: “I think that it is a distinct possibility that he has committed other offences.
“I’m not saying of exactly the same type, but other sexual type offences, either before 2003, or after 2003. It’s a line of inquiry that we have been actively following.
“We haven’t, as of yet, been able to find any definitive links with any other offences.
“We will continue to do so, to investigate, and we would urge any members of the public, with information regarding Quinn and additional offending to come forward and to give us that information.”
Quinn has a history of sexual offending and was first cautioned for counts of indecent assault against a female, when he was 12 years old.
Aged 14, in December 1988, he was convicted of a house burglary and in October 1992 convicted of two counts of assault.
A month later in November 1992, he was convicted of two counts of underage sex, an offence which today would be classified as rape. He was aged 16 and the girl 12 at the time of the offences.
Ten years later, it was this offence that led to his DNA being taken by police during a nationwide harvesting of samples of serious sex offenders.
His sample was added to the national database in 2012 and 10 years later ultimately led to his DNA profile being matched to the 2003 rape for which Andrew Malkinson was wrongly imprisoned.
Before then, Quinn was jailed for the first time in December 1993 for arson with intent to endanger life after setting fire to a wheelie bin outside the home of his ex-partner and her children in March of that year.
