Fifteen Arrested in Child Porn Swoop

Officers from the National Police arrested 15 people in several Spanish provinces, including Alicante, for allegedly storing child pornography in an investigation initiated thanks to US collaboration through the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

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The operation began when specialised agents of the Central Cybercrime Unit received information related to the sexual exploitation of minors on the Internet, by the authorities in the United States.

This body has the legal power to collect complaints from the content industry, classify them and then distribute them by country. Once this data was received, the agents analysed it and subjected it to intelligence processes to detect the most serious cases and those that, despite having different data, belong to the same individual. In this case, 15 different individuals were detected, all of them for saving images in the cloud.

In León, an individual was arrested who saved this content on his mobile phone and in the cloud. During the search, a conversation was found with another Spanish citizen, with whom he exchanged child pornography after meeting in a local television chat room.

The investigation into this second target located him in Alicante and it was discovered that he had been arrested in 2018 also for trafficking in child pornography. During the new entry and search carried out, two mobile phones where he stored more than six thousand illegal files were seized, for which he was arrested.

Also in the province of Alicante lived the owner of an email account from which nine different reports were issued, due to the number of images of sexual exploitation of minors that had been stored in it.

During the search, not only was the crime confirmed by observing a large number of photos and videos on the phone and computer of the person who had created the account, but also his brother was consuming those images and was in chats dedicated to it. Thus, both were arrested and brought to justice.

Further Arrests

The person investigated from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria clearly showed his intentions, given that the account he used made reference to sexual images of minors. Not only were abundant images of illegal content found on him, but his partner’s daughter had suffered abuse from the detainee when she was nine years old. After the arrest for possession of child pornography, they decided to formally report those events.

In Puertollano an individual was located who, at first, seemed to be in Madrid. During the entry and search, countless child pornography was found not only on the mobile phone, but also on different clouds. Up to 44 videos and five photographs were seized from another individual, detained in Pontevedra, which ruled out any possibility of accidental conduct.

The person arrested in Seville had almost 800 photos and 34 videos of clear child sexual content. During the search these files were found on his mobile phone that were downloaded through a laptop.

In Tenerife, an Italian citizen was arrested who had been reported up to 10 times and who had child pornography found on his devices, both hard drives and a mobile phone.

In Valladolid there were two different cases. The first of them, a 20-year-old Spanish man who, when going to be arrested, was aggressive, hitting a police officer in the face, requiring the action of four officers to immobilise him. Finally, it was determined that he was the alleged perpetrator of a crime of possession of child pornography, to which were added the crimes of attack and resistance to law enforcement agents.

In Zaragoza, an individual has been arrested who had the download session for this type of material open at the same time that the agents entered the home.

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