Officers from the National Police have arrested a dangerous child sexual predator in Madrid who, allegedly, used his status as a teacher in an educational centre in the capital to abuse minors. 36 victims have been identified, all of them between the ages of four and eight. The arrested man, an English national, also occasionally worked as a home caregiver for children, and used hidden forums on the TOR network to disseminate the material that he himself generated and obtain other images generated by third parties.
The police investigations began at the beginning of 2020 thanks to the cooperation and coordination between specialists dedicated to the fight against the sexual exploitation of minors on the Internet and the identification of victims. In this case, it was the Queensland Police Service, in Australia, who detected the commission of a crime of distribution of material related to the sexual exploitation of minors in exclusively paedophile-themed forums of the TOR network, and whose author, with a high probability, could be located in Spain.
After receiving the material, consisting of a multitude of photographs and videos that showed different minors being victims of sexual exploitation, an arduous task began by the National Police to identify the places where all the material could have been generated. The progress of the investigation allowed the outlining of one of the scenarios where a large part of the paedophile material could have been recorded, posing the hypothesis that it could be an educational centre located in Madrid, since the victims appeared to be primary school students.
Once the centre was determined, the agents analysed all the personnel who worked there since they were unaware of the position that the alleged perpetrator might hold. Parallel to these efforts, the distributed material continued to be checked, using all the forensic tools available to do so and succeeding in finding out that the images had been taken with a telephone terminal that had an English operating system.
Trying to find a link between the educational centre, its staff and the mobile phone operating system, the researchers scrupulously analysed the photographs that did not belong to the educational setting already located. For this, the agents studied numerous locations through the analysis of planimetries, cadastres and comparison of satellite images, among other techniques.
The assumption that the author was a teacher was most likely due to the enormous amount of material produced using different minors. This volume of victims could only be explained if the author had this position, which, without a doubt, was used to gain access to children. However, in a first investigation, none of the potential perpetrators had a judicial or police record for similar acts. This circumstance led to an in-depth study of the affiliation of all of them due to a possible fraudulent falsification of the data by the true author.
Finally, the police managed to identify a professor of English nationality, who had changed his affiliation as suspected, and who had a record in the United Kingdom for events of the same nature as those investigated. Specifically, he had been sentenced in his country of origin to a two-year prison sentence for possession of images of child sexual exploitation, in addition to a financial penalty as compensation for damages.
The experts had to use complex image processing techniques to initially obtain part of the affiliation of three of the minors that appeared in some images and videos. At this stage of the investigation, the suspect’s home was located and, urgently, the mandatory judicial authorisation was requested to carry out the pertinent search.
Given the seriousness of the events that occurred, and in order to safeguard the privacy and sexual indemnity of the minors, an extremely urgent operational device was established to ensure the detention. The search practice was extremely complex from a technical point of view, since the detainee used different anonymizers and encryption and concealment techniques that prevented access to the content hosted on the devices found at his home. Despite these technical impediments, it was possible to locate some of the files that gave rise to the investigation, requiring a more in-depth study of the devices.
During the search, the agents also located several falsified documents, which were used by the detainee to enter Spain and to get a job as a teacher, pretending to have a different name from the real one and going unnoticed by the authorities.
In Spain, it is an essential requirement, whenever there is regular contact with minors, to present a certificate that allows proving the lack or existence of crimes of a sexual nature on the date they are issued. This certificate, also falsified, was found at the detainee’s home, as well as the necessary instruments to carry out the simulation of the various documents.
Ten computer effects have been seized which, after a lengthy and meticulous forensic analysis process, allowed the extraction of a large volume of material. After its analysis, 36 victims between the ages of four and eight were identified, and it was found that the detainee, in addition to his duties as a teacher, had also worked as a caregiver for children at home. After the analysis of the intervened material, it has been possible to prove the commission of alleged crimes of sexual abuse of minors and the discovery and disclosure of secrets.
