Austrian investigators crack international child porn ring

Published on Wednesday 7 February 2007 14:23

AUSTRIAN authorities today said they have cracked a major international child pornography ring involving more than 2360 suspects from 77 countries who paid to view videos of young children being sexually abused.

Investigators believe the videos - which included images of infants and children up to age 14 - were made in Eastern Europe and uploaded to the site from somewhere in Britain. Federal police called the case "a strike against child pornography unprecedented in Austrian criminal history".

Interior Minister Guenther Platter said the FBI was investigating about 600 of the suspects in the United States. German authorities were following leads on another 400 people, France was looking into about 100 others, and at least 23 suspects were Austrians, he said.

Platter said videos downloaded from the Internet and seized by Austria's Federal Criminal Investigations Bureau included images that showed "the worst kind of child sexual abuse".

No suspects were yet in custody, but Austrian authorities said they were sharing their information with law enforcement in other countries in hopes that suspects could be investigated and charged.