A child pornography ring involving a Barcelona teacher and a man who filmed children in the playground has been busted.
There are 21 people under investigation in the State – one in the Catalan capital and two in Girona – and two arrested in Cáceres and Lugo have been remanded in custody.
BarcelonaSixteen men have been arrested and another five are being investigated for involvement in a child pornography possession and distribution network. The arrests have been made in different parts of Spain, and among those arrested are a high school teacher from Barcelona and another man, arrested in Girona, who photographed minors from his home while they were in a school playground. The latter man had distributed more than 85,000 files with images of minors, and during a search of his home, the police also found binoculars.
Spanish police have found thousands of images and videos of sexual assaults on minors and other degrading and humiliating practices against minors on the suspects' devices. Two of those implicated in this network, who were arrested in Cáceres (Extremadura) and Lugo (Galicia), were remanded in custody given "the seriousness and cruelty" of the sexual assaults depicted in the recordings they shared, the police force explained on Thursday.
The arrests made public by the Spanish police this Thursday are the latest step in an investigation that began when the cybercrime unit detected the sharing of these files through social networks. peer to peer (P2P). This technology allows users around the world to exchange files without the need for a central server to redistribute the data.
FBI involvement
International collaboration with other police forces, especially the FBI, has been "fundamental" to identifying those involved in this network, according to the Spanish police. In Spain, 21 people have been identified who allegedly participated in the distribution of child sexual exploitation material, and 16 have been arrested: two in Girona, one in Barcelona, one in Cáceres, one in Castellón, two in Asturias, two in Las Palmas, one in Lugo, one in Madrid, two in Guipúzcoa, one in Cantabria, and one in Cantabria. The five suspects who were not arrested live in Madrid, Málaga, Valladolid, and two in Navarra.
