Authorities in Austria have arrested 40 suspects and seized thousands of videos, CDs and DVDs as part of a year-long crackdown on child pornography.
The investigation began last year in July, when a man working for a Vienna-based Internet file-hosting service approached authorities at Austria’s interior ministry and revealed that he had noticed child pornography being downloaded during a routine check.
Since then the government was quite vigilant and in February this year, busted a major international child pornography ring involving more than 2,360 suspects from 77 countries who paid to view videos depicting infants and young children being sexually abused.
Police in Italy made two arrests in connection with the investigation recently, which was code-named Operation Max, Austrian authorities said.
Mario Hubmann, a senior police inspector with Austria’s Federal Criminal Investigations Bureau, said the suspects range in age from 16 to retirees in their 60s, including two government employees and a radiologist.
The authorities also asserted that users paid to download video of children under age 14 being sexually abused.
One of the most offensive and serious problems on the net is that of child pornography in particular and sexual offenders in general. Unscrupulous individuals and webmasters continue to infect the web with their filth by using underage children on their websites and other predatory behavior via the internet.
The citizens of the internet community must stand up, if we don’t stand up for the rights of the weak, then what kind of society are we going to become? Or will it be a society of zero-tolerance for child pornography on the internet?
