Hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of audiovisual material with extremely harsh child pornographic content. It is the “loot” removed from circulation in one of the largest police operations in Spain against the production, possession and distribution of pedophile content on the Internet.
An investigation by the National Police, with 121 detainees throughout the country (only three are women) and 125 searches in private homes.
The figures of this operation are dizzying: 500 terabytes (“teras”) or 500,000 GB, with rapes and sexual assaults on minors, 368 disks seized, 114 USB flash drives confiscated, as well as 427 CDs and DVDs, 60 computers and other computer material.
The dimension of this operation revealed yesterday against pedophile networks on the internet is unprecedented in Spain, police sources say. It has been directed by the Central Cybercrime Unit of the National Police – thanks to cyber patrolling – and has had the help of 46 territorial units of agents specialized in searching the cyber universe for pornographic material with girls and boys as protagonists.
The 121 detainees connected to the same digital platform to obtain and share these videos. And his unhealthy appetite for accumulating such extreme videos on his devices was bottomless.
The proof? One of those arrested in Madrid, the same sources reveal, had stored more than two million files of rapes and extreme and very violent sexual assaults on very young girls. You would have to spend months, if not years, to view all that material, spread across a dozen high-capacity hard drives.
In this operation, it has been confirmed, on the other hand, that those detained people were not limited to consuming and exchanging those files. In Alicante, the agents verified that one of the men arrested in that city had recorded some of those videos with minors (in this case a sexual relationship between two men) at his home. So there are also, among those arrested, producers of that material, which was later disseminated on that platform.
Hernán Puente, spokesperson for the National Police, reports that the abundant material seized "is now being analyzed by cybercrime experts" and ventures that "more arrests are not ruled out depending on the evolution of these investigations."
In Cáceres and Almería, thousands of child pornography files were also found in these searches on technological media for the detainees. The Police report that in three of these cases, imprisonment has already been ordered for the alleged pedophiles.
And since the macro-operation, which is now being reported, has been developed in several weeks, there has already been movement in the courts with at least one of the detainees, with a corresponding sentence of 5 years in prison for a crime of possession and distribution of child sexual exploitation material.
