Child pornography on the internet
Darknet abuse forum closed – several Germans arrested
Child prography was distributed via the deactivated site on the dark web
© Karl-Josef Hildenbrand / DPA
Police seized large amounts of child pornography during a raid. NRW Interior Minister Herbert Reul speaks of a “dizzyingly large” case.
After a major nationwide operation against child abuse, a child pornography platform on the Darknet with hundreds of thousands of users has been taken offline. The platform has been a forum for pedophilia since 2019, said North Rhine-Westphalia’s Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) on Tuesday at a press conference in Duisburg. The number of users on the site was in the hundreds of thousands. The case was “dizzyingly big,” said Reul.
Seven people were therefore arrested. Reul said it was largely the leadership of this platform who are now “sitting behind bars for now”. The seven accused are Germans from different federal states. 200 forces were deployed in the strike against the abuse platform.
There were searches in six federal states in September. The investigators were able to secure extensive evidence. A total of 1,517 exhibits such as laptops and cell phones were found. The seized DVDs and video cassettes alone filled 94 moving boxes.
The exact amount of data cannot currently be estimated. The minister said that a data volume of 13.5 terabytes had to be evaluated on the computer of a single defendant – that corresponds to around 3.4 million photos.
Investigations into the distribution of child pornography
The suspects are two 45- and 56-year-old men from North Rhine-Westphalia, a 43-year-old from Schleswig-Holstein, a 61-year-old from Baden-Württemberg, a 62-year-old from Lower Saxony, a 69-year-old from Rhineland-Palatinate and a 45 year old from Bavaria. Six suspects are in custody.
They are considered the “leading backers” of the Darknet platform. She is being investigated for gang-related distribution of child pornographic content. Image and video files showing the sexual abuse of underage girls are distributed on the Darknet platform.