Britons under investigation in global internet paedophile ring
Bobbie Johnson and Kate Connolly
Thursday February 8, 2007
The Guardian
· Austrian police claim over 2,000 people
involved
· Abuse videos downloaded from Russian website
Twenty-nine Britons are being investigated on suspicion of downloading child pornography after European investigators claimed to have cracked one of the largest global paedophile rings ever discovered.
Austrian police said they have uncovered details of a worldwide network of internet paedophiles involving more than 2,300 individuals in countries including Algeria, Venezuela, Iceland, Germany and the US.
The investigation is focusing on a selection of individuals who downloaded videos of child abuse from a Russian website, officials said.
Information on 72 potential British suspects was passed to the UK's anti-abuse unit, the child exploitation and online protection centre (Ceop), which then narrowed it down to 29 individuals.
A spokeswoman confirmed the centre had received information from Interpol in connection with the Austrian police inquiry. "Inquiries have been undertaken by the centre and intelligence on 29 UK suspects has now been passed to police forces throughout the UK for further investigation," she said.
The Austrian investigation, Operation Flo, began last summer with a tip-off from the employee of a Vienna-based internet company. He alerted the authorities after noticing a series of violent videos involving children during a routine maintenance check of his computer. Eight videos had been downloaded on to his machine by hackers, and appeared to have been originally sent from a computer in Britain.
Criminals hijacked other people's machines to hide their trail as they passed the videos to a Russian website, which was being accessed by thousands of people every day. The man, who has not been named, monitored the details of more than 2,000 computers using the site and then handed the information over to Austria's interior ministry.
Günther Platter, Austria's interior minister, said the case was the "largest incidence of the sharing of pornographic data" ever uncovered in the country, and the operation leader, Harald Gremel, said the material involved victims as young as five.
"The videos were probably made in eastern Europe," he said. "Girls could be seen being raped and you could also hear screams."
Officials said more than eight terabytes of data had been seized during the course of the operation, equivalent to more than 250 days of continuous video or 4m printed pages of information.
A Ceop official said the case files handed to British authorities did not include the names of potential suspects, but gave information such as the internet addresses of individual computers accessing the Russian website. By comparing this information with the centre's own work, Ceop investigators were able to reveal a number of potential offenders. Local police forces are now believed to be following up on that intelligence.
The net cast by Operation Flo has reached around the globe, with more than 600 Americans and 400 Germans also under suspicion. So far 14 of the 23 Austrians suspected of using the site have admitted their guilt. The Viennese authorities say they have handed intelligence over to law enforcement agencies in a total of 77 countries.
The sheer scope could make it one of the largest international paedophile investigations since Operation Ore, the largest child exploitation investigation in history, that saw thousands of men jailed after raids on the offices of a US website. Landslide Productions, which distributed illegal images from Texas, and had more than 250,000 subscribers around the world. The subsequent inquiry led to more than 1,400 convictions in Britain alone.
Mr Platter urged people to be on the lookout for child pornography. "It is important people don't turn a blind eye to this."
