German police shut down pedophile website with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide

By Timo Kirez

GENEVA (AA) - Police in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia announced in a press release on Tuesday that they have shut down a pedophile website on the so-called Darknet with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.

“After intensive investigations and searches in several federal states, six suspected leaders of a darknet platform were arrested,” the statement said.

Those arrested are accused of “the gang-like distribution of child pornographic content.”

A total of 1,517 objects, including laptops, computers, cell phones and 94 moving boxes containing video tapes and DVDs, among other things, were confiscated by the police and are now being analyzed, the police added.

According to the police, the exact amount of data cannot yet be estimated. “On one computer of a suspect alone, 13.5 terabytes are to be analyzed. For a photo with an average file size of 4 MB, this corresponds to around 3.4 million photos,” said the press release.

“What the Duisburg police have triggered with their investigations is not a flash in the pan, but a wildfire in the child pornography scene. The scene now has one less playground for its abominations,” the interior minister of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Herbert Reul, told a press conference.

The state's justice minister, Benjamin Limbach, said “the success of the police investigation is a drumbeat. It sends an unmistakable signal to all perpetrators of child abuse: You can't hide! Not behind four walls, not behind a pseudonym and not on the darknet!”

According to the investigators' evaluations, hundreds of thousands of active users were identified worldwide. Special units and special forces from several German states were involved in the operation.