Nearly 10,000 child molesters, scattered across 50 countries, more than 70,000 messages and 23,000 photos exchanged, “many of which were personal productions”. After infiltrating discussion groups on Telegram messaging in July 2024, police officers from the Minors Office (Ofmin) arrested four suspected child molesters, including a sixty-year-old in Gironde, announced the Bordeaux prosecutor's office. The man was indicted and imprisoned.
Ofmin had particularly focused on “certain groups with restricted access” whose members presented themselves as “producers of videos of sexual abuse committed against minors around them”, writes the public prosecutor of Bordeaux, Frédérique Porterie, in a press release. According to the magistrate, the arrest in September of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov “facilitated the identification of prioritized and located targets in France and abroad”.
This led to the arrest in Bordeaux on November 12 of a 63-year-old man. He was then suspected of rape of a minor aged 15, possession of an image of a minor of a pornographic nature and offering or making available an image or representation of a minor of a pornographic nature.
The suspect admitted the facts. Except rape of a minor. The man had “obviously boasted of acts via the Internet that he had not committed”, further indicates the Bordeaux prosecutor's office. He will be tried on April 15. In the meantime, he has been placed under judicial supervision.
This case, according to the Bordeaux public prosecutor's office, “already illustrates the extent of the online child crime phenomenon” and “also reveals the functioning of the child crime community” which in fact is not really organized into a network. According to Frédérique Porterie, “it is more the possession of unpublished content of sexual abuse of minors, resulting from personal production, as well as the tastes of the different pedophiles which structure the volatile exchanges and the opportunistic links developed between child abusers “.
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