More than thirty arrested for distributing child pornography and assaulting minors
Four of those arrested by the National Police are from the province of Barcelona.
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BarcelonaMajor operation by the National Police against the dissemination of pornography throughout the State, including in Catalonia. The Spanish police force has arrested 35 people spread across 21 different provinces, with four arrests in Barcelona, one of them in Argentona. Specifically, those investigated stored and exchanged sexual content of minors, including sexual assaults, through an instant messaging channel.
The police investigation has led to the accumulation of a large amount of pornographic material, which the detainees mainly stored in the cloud on their devices. The searches total 42, with 112 devices seized. The detainees must now be added to those arrested, plus another seven people investigated for the same offenses.
The investigation began following a citizen collaboration email alerting them to a possible link containing images of child sexual exploitation. Thanks to the cooperation of companies dedicated to mass cloud storage and cross-referencing of police data, it was possible to identify the main suspects in this messaging channel.
A sexual assault
In fact, during a body search of one of the suspects, arrested in Salamanca, police determined that he had allegedly participated in the sexual assault of two young girls, which he had also recorded. The police found dozens of videos on the computers of those involved: one of the five arrested in Madrid, for example, used 14 different cloud storage accounts, all of which contained images of sexual content. Another of the suspects, this one in Albacete, stored more than 10 gigabytes of child pornography in both a cloud storage account and an instant messaging application.
The officers' investigation also revealed that one of the detainees in Castellón used a video game console to store images of child pornography. During a search of the home of a detainee in Vizcaya, it was found that he had 50 GB of cloud storage capacity, 48 GB of which were occupied by saved images of sexual assaults against children.
During the 24 searches, 39 hard drives, 46 memory cards, 27 USB drives, 58 mobile phones, 16 laptops and 6 desktop computers, 2 video game consoles, and documentation relevant to the investigation were seized. Five arrests were made in Madrid, four in Barcelona, four in Alicante, three in Castellón, another three in Valencia, and two in Málaga. There are several provinces with only one arrest, such as Salamanca, Asturias, Cáceres, La Rioja, León, Cádiz, Albacete, Vizcaya, Navarra, Las Palmas, Seville, and Ourense.