Suspect arrested in hunt for 'night stalker' rapist

Detectives hunting one of the most prolific sex offenders in British criminal history say they have made a "significant" arrest almost two decades after the serial rapist first struck.

A 52-year-old married man was arrested at his home in London in the early hours of Sunday morning and was being held at an undisclosed police station by Scotland Yard.

He will be questioned about attacks on more than 108 elderly people, aged between 68 and 88, which were carried out in south-east London and date back to the early 1990s.

The investigation into the series of attacks, which involved rapes and sexual assaults, is the largest operation in the Metropolitan police's recent past. It has involved thousands of police hours, specialist ancestral DNA analysis, and DNA tests on more than 2,000 individuals.

The attacker first struck in 1992 when an 84-year-old woman was raped after a break-in at the flat where she lived alone in the Shirley area of Croydon. A DNA sample was recovered, but no match existed on the then relatively small database. His DNA was recovered again five years later.

Detectives have said the attacker is positively linked through semen traces and crime pattern analysis to at least four rapes and his stalking ground is mainly in south-east London. Police working on Operation Minstead have used criminal profilers, taken voluntary DNA from up to 900 people and offered a reward of £40,000 for help in finding the Night Stalker.