SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- Australian police have arrested 70
people and removed four children from their homes as part of a
six-month nationwide investigation of a global child pornography
network, police said Thursday.
Twenty other people have been summoned to appear in court. All
90 -- including a police officer and several teachers -- face charges
of accessing images of children being abused on the Internet,
police said.
Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said the
Interpol-led investigation was conducted simultaneously by law
enforcement authorities in 170 countries. Further arrests are
expected, he said.
It was one of the largest child pornography investigations in
Australian history, police said.
The investigation was triggered after a hacker posted 99 child
porn images on a European Web site, which attracted 12 million hits
in just 76 hours, including 2,800 from Australian computers, police
said.
Federal police assistant commissioner Andrew Colvin said 1,500
people or computers in Australia had been identified so far through
their Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses.
Thousands of DVDs of child pornography and dozens of computers
have been seized in the investigation, he said.
The children in the images range from babies to those 18 years
of age. Some images show rapes and other abuses, Keelty said.
"These are not children in passive positions. These are
children who are being abused," he told reporters. "The real
tragedy of this is that we don't know the origins of a lot of these
children. We don't know whether these children are still being the
victims of child abuse."
Police said four children who are dependents of alleged
offenders were removed from their homes for their safety, but could
not confirm whether they appeared in any of the seized images.
Possession of child pornography carries a maximum penalty of 10
years in prison.
Fonte: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080605/ap_on_re_au_an/australia_child_pornography
