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70 held in child porn crackdown in Sydney
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NewsByte on 05 June, 2008 03:41:20
 
Sydney, June 5: Seventy men in Australia have been arrested in a global
crackdown on Internet child pornography and more will be detained, the police
said on Thursday.
The Interpol-led probe involving 170 countries was launched after a hacker
posted 99 child porn images on a European website, which attracted 12 million
hits in just 76 hours.
More than 2,800 computer Internet protocol (IP) addresses were traced back to
Australia and federal police identified all of them in a six-month operation,
the police commissioner Mick Keelty said.
"You will see more arrests, the investigations are continuing," Mr Keelty told
reporters. Mr Keelty said the first arrests were made in cases where children
might be in danger and four children had been taken from their homes.
Several teachers, a federal police officer and a sports administrator were
reportedly among those arrested. "It’s really one of the largest single
operations we’ve done on child pornography with our international partners and
our state police partners here in Australia," Mr Keelty said.
"You’re talking about 12 million hits from around the world but in a small
time period of three days. In Australia the operation has netted over a million
images of children, and these are not children in passive positions, these are
children who are being abused."
The children range in age from babies to 18 years old, he said.
—AFP