Subject: [Stop-traffic] News/Russia: Child porn ring
From: Melanie Orhant (morhant@igc.org)
Date: Fri Jan 05 2001 - 10:15:08 EST
Reprinted by Moscow Times
Thursday, Dec. 21, 2000, 6:10 PM Moscow Time
Police Crack U.S. and European Child Porn Ring
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Russian police, working with British and American
colleagues, arrested two suspects
accused of selling child pornography over the Internet
in Europe and the United
States, a police spokeswoman said Thursday in Moscow.
The spokeswoman said one of the suspects was arrested
Wednesday evening in a
Moscow apartment, while the other was nabbed
simultaneously in a military hospital in
Russia's second city St Petersburg. Both were
unemployed men, aged 30 and 28.
She said police from the United States and Britain had
played a role in the arrests, but
did not elaborate.
Police seized 588 video cassettes, 112 video discs and
more than 1,000 photographs of
pornography, some of it involving children. The
suspects were accused of selling the
material over the Internet and through the mail.
The arrests show an apparent trend of Russian
pornographers using the Internet to
feed an appetite for child pornography abroad, and
police worldwide teaming up to
fight them.
In October, a prosecutor in Italy charged 1,491 people
with sending or receiving child
pornography from a website.
A month earlier, Italian police swooped on 600 homes,
arresting eight people on
charges of possessing or trading in child pornography,
all of it from Russia.
Italian police said the Russian ring had kidnapped
children from orphanages and filmed
them being forced to have sex, sometimes raping and
torturing them to death on
camera.
The cases rocked Italy, drawing a massive public
outcry. Officials at Italy's state
broadcaster were forced to resign after excerpts from
videos were shown on the
evening news.
Russian police later said they had captured three
members of that ring in February this
year and retrieved lists of their clients in the United
States, Britain, Germany and Italy,
which they passed on through Interpol.
One of the men caught in February had participated in
sex acts on film himself and was
sentenced to 11 years in prison, but the other two were
charged only with selling
pornography and released under a general amnesty for
minor crimes.
Russian law does not provide stiffer penalties for
selling pornography that involves
children, a police official said.
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