A PSYCHOPATH who raped and murdered "Britain's worst paedophile" in a prison near York in an act of "poetic justice" has been told he will spend a minimum of 34 years in jail.

Paul Fitzgerald, 30, strangled Richard Huckle with an electrical cable sheath during a 78-minute attack in his cell at Full Sutton, a top security jail in East Yorkshire.

He said he would have like to have cooked and eaten parts of Huckle's body and would have gone on to kill more inmates but was "having too much fun".

Fitzgerald said he wanted Huckle, who was given 22 life sentences at the Old Bailey in 2016 for an unprecedented number of offences against children aged between six months and 12 years, to feel what his victims had felt.

Sentencing him at Hull Crown Court today, Mr Justice Lavender said he had "taken the law into his own hands".

He said: "You are a psychopath and you derive pleasure from fantasising about raping, torturing, killing, and even eating others. On this occasion you derived pleasure from acting out your fantasies."

The court had been told that Fitzgerald went into Huckle's cell on October 13 last year, armed with makeshift weapons, made out of a toothbrush and a pen, a ligature and items to gag him and bind his arms and legs.

Mr Justice Lavender said: "You intended to rape and kill Mr Huckle and, if possible, cook parts of him and eat them.

"You did this for your own pleasure and also to inflict what you called poetic justice on a convicted paedophile."

The court heard that Fitzgerald, who suffers from psychopathy, anti-social personality disorder and gender identity disorder, has previous convictions for violent and sexual offences, starting from the age of 13 and including the false imprisonment of a female prison officer.

The judge said the only mitigating features of the case were Fitzgerald's mental health issues, which were the result of physical and sexual abuse he suffered as a child.

He said: "They were the source of your urge to kill, which motivated you."

Fitzgerald appeared at the sentencing hearing by video link to prison, wearing rosary beads and with a shaven head and long, goatee beard.

He appeared to laugh at several points throughout the hearing and yawned and stretched his arms as the judge passed his life sentence.

Huckle, from Ashford, in Kent, awarded himself "paedo-points" for different acts of abuse against 191 youngsters and sold images of his depravity on the dark web.

In online posts, he bragged that it was easier to target impoverished children in Malaysia than those from wealthy western backgrounds.

At the time of his arrest, at Gatwick Airport in 2014, he was writing a guide to teach fellow paedophiles how to abuse children and avoid detection.