Euro 'child porn network' smashed
Monday, 05 Nov 2007 19:42
Prosecutors are confident they have smashed a major child abuse network
A continental-wide crackdown on a European child pornography network has resulted in the arrest of 46 Britons.
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOPC) coordinated the UK arrests, as part of a wider action which resulted in the identification of over 2,500 alleged "customers" of the child abuse videos and images in 19 countries.
At the centre of the network was an Italian man who was earning "considerable" profits from selling sexually explicit videos of underage girls, prosecutors say.
After the abusive material initially came to the attention of investigators in 2006 with the discovery of a child pornography video in Australia, the network eventually unravelled.
Twenty-three girls aged between nine and 16 were identified from the videos, which were filmed in Belgium, the Netherlands and Ukraine. Often children posed in specific positions at the request of paying 'customers'.
After the suspect's arrest as part of Europol's operation Koala, the abusive material was analysed and distributed to national police forces.
CEOPC chief executive Jim Gamble commented: "Yet again we see the technology used by paedophiles to facilitate child abuse now turned against them as a result of coordinated and effective international law enforcement cooperation.
"Operation Koala uncovered the true meaning of 'online child abuse': in this case, the exchanging of images in which real children were subjected to horrific sexual abuse, often to order."