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Europol in hunt to stop crimes against children

THE HAGUE: European police organisation Europol said on Friday it expected to make more arrests soon in its campaign to clear the Internet of paedophiles and to stop crimes against babies and small children.

Fresh from arresting more than 30 people in coordinated police raids across 10 countries on Thursday, Europol’s head of serious crime, Mariano Simancas, said police were using new techniques to halt paedophiles operating secretly on the Web.

In the past paedophiles used the Internet so they could remain anonymous and untraceable, but Europol experts said national police forces now had ways to pierce that armour.

Simancas declined to be specific but said the new techniques included cross-checking databases, exchanging of information between investigators and other, more sophisticated procedures.

“Behind child pornography is child abuse, is sexual exploitation of children and that is not normal crime,” he told Reuters in an interview.

“We’re not just talking about victims at the limit of the age of consent. There are a lot of cases in which the victim is a baby or a very young child of four or five years old.

“The psychological damage to those children is forever,” Simancas said, adding some police officers who had viewed the material needed counselling afterwards.

In some cases the parents, more often the father, were the ones taking the pictures.

“How safe are our children? It is difficult to say,” he said adding older children were sometimes lured into meetings with paedophiles via Internet chat rooms. Often the perpetrators of the crime publish their own pictures or videos online. Simancas said Internet rings use bulletin boards to exchange information and data and are very well organised and structured even though they contain people of many nationalities.

“Because of the use of Internet, the crime has increased,” he said, adding that the speed of information also encouraged paedophiles. The arrests made on Thursday, in which many thousands of images were seized, were part of operation Odysseus and was led by a German national crime squad. It followed similar earlier operations in 2002 and 2003.

Simancas said other hauls would follow.

“To say this is just the tip of the iceberg is too strong. But this was not the only (Internet) board, there are many more.” —Reuters

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