Posted on 07/02/2002 5:36:42 AM PDT by NativeNewYorker
London, July 2 (Bloomberg) -- Fifty people were arrested overnight in seven European countries after a yearlong investigation into a pedophile ring that traded child pornography over the Internet, the U.K.'s Sky News and the BBC reported.
The U.K.'s London-based National High-Tech Crime Unit coordinated the investigation by 12 police agencies in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere in Europe into the so-called Shadowz Brotherhood. Thirty-one of the arrests in ``Operation Twins'' were made in Germany, with the rest in the U.K., Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden, Reuters reported.
The ring used the latest data-encryption techniques to swap photographs and videos of children being abused. In some instances, live images were transmitted, Sky cited the agency as saying. Some of the victims were babies, investigators told the British Broadcasting Corp.
``This was a very sophisticated group,'' the unit's chief, Len Hynds, told Sky News. ``They believed they were beyond the reach of the law.''
The group of about 100 pedophiles was arranged in a hierarchy, in which ``administrators'' recruited and screened members and rewarded them with greater access to the ring's encrypted sites in return for contributions of their own child pornography, Sky News cited the High-Tech Crime Unit as saying.
Sixteen other suspects were arrested in earlier raids in connection with the investigation, including a U.S. Air Force officer whose arrest led him to commit suicide, the BBC reported.
Europol, the liaison agency for European Union police forces, chose the U.K. unit to lead the investigation because of its expertise in dealing with computer crime, the news services said.
After a slow and painful death....
Of course, in various jurisdictions of our country that have enacted bans on discrimination based on "sexual orientation" these perverts would get a pass, I suppose.
How many of them were high-ranking government ministers?
About the author Dr. Edward Brongersma, a well-known scholar and proponent of inter- generational relationships, is the author of Loving Boys. A lawyer, elected as Senator to the Dutch Parliament, he was arrested and convicted for having had sex with a minor. After release from a term of 11 months of incarceration, to the credit of Dutch society and its level of civilization Brongerema was re-elected to the Senate and served as Chair of the Judiciary Committee. Brongersma eventually retired from politics but remained active in writing, fundraising and research. The present article, from The International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, is a small part of his contribution to promoting a better understanding of human sexuality.
The identities were redacted from court documents because they were high-level government functionaries.
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