Over 100 arrested, under investigation in Spain kiddie-porn raids

Madrid, Agency
More than a hundred people have been arrested or are under investigation as a result of police raids against child pornography carried out in Spain over the last few days, Interior Ministry officials said Friday.

Arrested in the operation were 57 people (11 of whom have been handed over to judicial authorities), while another 47 are under investigation, police said, adding that 400 officers took part in 97 searches throughout Spain in less than three days.

One of those in custody, a gardener now in the hands of prosecutors, besides possessing and distributing child-pornography files, had made porn videos of two young family members ages seven and 14.

Among those implicated are local police, computer engineers, company managers, workers, students and unemployed persons.

Police coordinated by the Technological Investigation Brigade have seized 328 hard drives, 40 laptops, 21 CPUs, two portable computers, hundreds of DVDs and CDs, 13 USB memory sticks and eight memory cards.

To search the Web and identify users who share and distribute files over exchange networks, the agents for the first time used the NordicMule software developed by Norway's National Criminal Investigation Service.

This sophisticated program allows police to download without sharing the content of the downloaded files, select the country were the users under investigation are located and also bring up graphics detailing information on people using the files under investigation at any particular moment.

After ordering the download, the program automatically creates a table where all the data necessary for carrying out the identification of the users under investigation are reflected.

Taking advantage of the app's possibilities, police introduced 857 "p2p" links to porn videos that had been reported by individual citizens to police stations.

Analyzed in the course of the investigation were more than 20,000 links, and only those links were selected that had downloaded entire illicit files with names referring specifically to kiddie-porn material.

Identified in Spain were 125 users who were distributing files under investigation on the Web and whose links were found to be associated with suppliers of Internet access also located in this country.

Everyone identified had downloaded to their computers several files of hard-core child pornography, such as sexual attacks on very young children, and had made them available on the Internet.