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Greek police cracks child porn ring
ATHENS, Jun 24, 2009 (Xinhua via COMTEX) --
Greek police have cracked a major
child porn ring operating via the Internet, with 39 people charged
in connection with the case, according to a police announcement on
Wednesday.
Police said a joint investigation by the Athens and
Thessaloniki electronic crime squads lasted more than three
months. Those under arrest included 37 Greeks and two foreign
nationals. All the accused were living and working in Athens,
Thessaloniki and 10 other cities around Greece.
Of the 39 people charged, 20 were caught in the act of
disseminating hard-core pornographic material from their computers
during a coordinated operation carried out simultaneously in
several cities at once.
The investigation was begun based on information supplied by
German authorities, who had tracked the electronic traces of 170
Greek Internet users in one of their own investigations, during
which they discovered the existence of a file sharing network used
to disseminate child porn.
Using this information, Greek electronic crime officers managed
to identify 39 of the users and staged a coordinated operation
held between June 13 and June 19, in collaboration with local
police.
Many of those placed under arrest were found to have more than
three files containing child porn and will thus face criminal
charges.
Among the items impounded as evidence were 87 computer hard
drives, five laptops, and a large number of CDs and DVDs
containing child pornography.
Some of the people charged were not at home at the time of the
raid but had left their computers linked up to the Internet and
were in the process of downloading the pornographic material.
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