Austria uncovers international child-porn ring
Austrian Federal Criminal Police Office has discovered a global child pornography ring, involving more than 2,360 suspects from 77 countries who view videos of young children being terribly sexually abused, local media reported on Wednesday.
Interior Minister Guenther Platter said that it had been the "biggest case of child-porn transmission" detected in Austria as well as the "worst kind of children sexual abuse."
Erich Zwettler, an officer from the Federal Criminal Police Office, told media that the children were under the age of 14 and "the youngest was estimated to be only five years old."
Those videos "were probably produced in Eastern Europe" and were uploaded to web sites in other countries, including Britain, said Harald Gremel, an Austrian police expert on internet crime who headed the investigation.
By checking the IP address of the computers accessing the web site, the Austrian authorities traced the paedophiles in different countries. Within a 24-hour period, investigators recorded more than 8,000 clicks from 2,361 computer IP addresses in 77 countries world-wide.
Of the 2,361 addresses, about 600 are located in the United States, 400 in Germany, 103 suspects in Canada and more than 100 others are in France.
And 14 of the 23 suspects in Austria, ranging from students to retirees, have already made confessions.- Xinhua
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