PARIS – French police have arrested about 60 people suspected of downloading, consulting and sharing thousands of child pornography photos and videos online, a senior official told AFP on Thursday.
The suspects, aged between 28 and 75, were netted in a vast, nationwide operation that started Monday, and include four people also suspected of child rape, according to Eric Berot, head of the police's OCRVP office responsible for investigating paedophilia.
“This goes to show that downloading child pornography is not trivial," said Berot, adding that “some people act out” what they see in such images.
Among the suspects are a football coach, an imam, an IT specialist, a retired teacher and several unemployed people. Almost all are men, with the sole exception a couple who consulted the images together.
“There is no single profile. People from all social circles are involved,” Berot said.
About a dozen among those arrested were known sex offenders.
The police operation targeted almost a third of France's 101 departments, and required the deployment of 220 police officers.
The suspects shared images via peer-to-peer networks, allowing them to bypass a central server.
Investigators, aided by software used by the FBI, were able to break into the network, trace the users' IP addresses and monitor their downloads.
Officers seized about 100 external hard drives, dozens of mobile phones and laptops, some 150 USB keys, as well as DVDs and CDs, containing thousands of photos and videos.
One of the suspects had a water-cooled server with 176 terabytes of downloaded data, Berot said.
Dozens of suspects have been handed over to local prosecutors, and one man, brought straight to court, has already been sentenced to 10 months' imprisonment. – AFP, October 8, 2020
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