Regarding to British media the biggest ever global operation against organised paedophilia has announced the results of a three year sting on child abuse. 184 child abusers have been arrested as part of Operation Rescue, a global sting to crack down on online paedophilia.
The operation targeted 670 offenders in an investigation spanning countries including the UK, Australia, USA, Brazil, Europe and New Zealand. 121 of those arrested were from the UK of whom 33 individuals have been convicted and sentenced in the last three years, during the course of the operation. Over 200 children are now safe and protected from their abusers.
Rob Wainwright, head of Europol, the European Police Agency, said in a statement from the Hague: “I am proud of the exceptional work of our experts in helping police authorities around the world to record these groundbreaking results. Suspects have also been found in the Netherlands, Italy, Australia, Thailand and Canada after police forces infiltrated a website.
Set up as a chat-room, a minority of its 70,000 subscribing members then made contact with each other elsewhere on the web to swap illegal images and and videos.
The site came under scrutiny in 2007, when the UK’s Child Expolitation and Online Protection team (CEOP) and Australian Federal Police (AFP) joined forces after their own initial investigations and began monitoring the migration of members from the ‘legal’ site towards connections and online movement that led to illegal activities.
From 2008 the UK and Australian teams were joined by a number of task forces from around the world as the global scale of the network system became clear.
The website has now been shut down. You can read more on channel4 news pages online.
