British police smash online paedeophile ring
An elite British police unit has smashed a global internet paedophile ring with more than 700 suspects in 35 countries and saved more than 30 children from abuse, it was revealed today.
Undercover officers infiltrated a website called ?Kids, the Light of Our Lives? where members used a chatroom to swap photographs and videos of children being subjected to horrific sexual abuse.
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) centre said today that 31 children had been rescued from actual abuse by paedophiles.
Later today, Timothy David Martyn Cox, 27, from Buxhall, Suffolk, will be sentenced at Ipswich Crown court after admitted nine offences of possessing or distributing indecent images of children.
Cox masqueraded behind the online identity ?Son of God? and was a leading administrator in the chat room dedicated to the sexual exploitation of children. He was arrested in September last year, which allowed the officers to infiltrate the chatroom and gather evidence on other members.
About 200 of the suspects are in the UK.
Hundreds of members of the group, some as far away as America and Australia, were able to use the site to trade a range of abusive material including photgraphs and videos of children being subjected to serious sexual assaults.
Some of the victims were as young as 18 months old.
Of the 700 suspects identified some have been dealt with by courts around the world. Others are still being investigated.
When officers examined Cox?s computer they found almost 76,000 indecent images and said that he had supplied 11,495 images to other users of the site.
Officers from CEOP can trace and rescue the children involved by carefully studying clues in the images.
In a separate case one child was rescued from her abusive father when officers spotted an unusual cornice on the ceiling of the room where she was being abused and a box of tools.
Police called in the help of an architectural historian, who pinpointed the Edwardian era design to six large houses in a certain area of the country.
The barcode from the tool box was enlarged and traced to a DIY store near one of the houses. Store records then gave officers six names of people that had bought that box and police had their man.
In 1998 British police were involved in what was then the biggest international police operation led by this country when they smashed an international paedophile ring operating in 12 countries and seized hundreds of thousands of indecent images of children.
Those arrested were allegedly members of Wonderland, a secret internet club for paedophiles all over the world, based in the United States. Members had to be invited to join and had to prove that they had more than 10,000 separate images of children different to the hundreds of thousands already stored in the Wonderland database.
The global police operation, codenamed Cathedral, was co-ordinated by the National Crime Squad in London. Officers raided suspects' houses simultaneously in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Finland, Austria, Belgium and America.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle1948893.ece