Status: 05/30/2022 12:46 p.m
A man from North Rhine-Westphalia is said to have abused children for years and collected enormous amounts of child pornographic data. The youngest victim was one month old. Police are investigating 70 other suspects.
In a new large-scale investigation into child abuse and child pornography, the police are investigating more than 70 suspects from 14 federal states nationwide. Only Bremen and Saarland have not been affected so far, according to a joint press conference by the public prosecutor and the Cologne police. They set up the special unit “BAO (Special Organizational Structure) List” to investigate the crimes. According to the investigators, the new abuse complex has a dimension of brutality that even exceeds that of Lügde.
The starting point was therefore a case from Berlin. During the investigations there, the investigators came across a 44-year-old from Wermelskirchen in North Rhine-Westphalia, who is said to have severely sexually abused children himself and is in custody. He is said to have offered himself as a babysitter in the Cologne area and abused twelve children on these occasions between 2005 and 2019. Half of the children were no more than three years old.
Huge amount of data confiscated
The Cologne police also found huge amounts of child pornography and depictions of abuse on him. It took the police 18 days to copy the 32 terabytes of data from the suspect’s computer system. In order not to lose track of himself, the man is said to have kept detailed lists that are now helping to identify the other suspects.
“I have never encountered such an extent of inhuman brutality and callous indifference to the suffering of small children, their pain and their screams and their obvious fear, and I also could not have imagined it,” said Cologne Police Commissioner Falk Schnabel.
33 victims identified so far
The recordings are images and videos of the most severe abuse and rape. So far, 33 victims have been identified who were between one month and 14 years old at the time of the crime. The earliest verifiable act took place in 2005, said Jürgen Haese, an investigator with the Cologne criminal police. Some of the identified victims are now adults and only found out from the police that they were abused as children.
According to the investigators, there is no evidence so far that a group or a pedophile ring could be behind the crimes. The main suspect acted alone and maintained individual contacts with other perpetrators, it said.