UN staff have carried out thousands of rapes all around the world, a former official claimed on Tuesday.

Andrew MacLeod, who was chief of operations at the UN's Emergency Co-ordination Centre, warned that 'predatory' abusers used aid jobs to prey on vulnerable girls. The claim was made in a dossier passed to the former secretary for international development Priti Patel last year, according to The Sun newspaper.

He estimated 60,000 rapes had been carried out by UN staff in the past decade, with 3,300 paedophiles working in the organisation and its agencies. He added there is an 'endemic' of cover-ups with those trying to blow the whistle getting fired.

'There are tens of thousands of aid workers around the world with paedophile tendencies, but if you wear a Unicef T-shirt nobody will ask what you're up to,' he told The Sun.

'You have the impunity to do whatever you want. It is endemic across the aid industry across the world. The system is at fault, and should have stopped this years ago.'

MacLeod's estimates were based on UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres's own admission last year that UN peacekeepers and civilian staff abused 311 victims in just one 12 month period over 2016.

The UN also admits that the likely true number of cases reported against its staff is double that, as figures outside of war zones are not centrally collated. On top of that only around 1 in 10 sexual assaults are reported.

The charity sector has been rocked by allegations of abuse after an investigation by the Times newspaper discovered Oxfam workers gave aid in exchange for sexual favours when working in Haiti after the earthquake.

Patel has accused the department for international development of being part of the cover-up and said she was held back from giving a critical speech about aid workers' sex abuse.

Christian Today has approached DfID for comment.