German police strike against child porn platforms

Berlin: After years of investigations, German police in Bavaria have clamped down on an international child pornography ring and shut down three darknet platforms.

Six suspects were arrested in the US, the UK and Germany, the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office (BLKA) and the federal state's Central Office for Cybercrime (ZCB) said in a statement on Friday, Xinhua news agency reported.

The suspects are believed to have worked as administrators, programmers or moderators of the platforms, according to the German authorities. All arrests were made in 2022.

The illegal darknet sites had been used by several thousand people in Germany and abroad. They wrote around 120,000 posts and distributed more than 20,000 images and videos of child pornography per month.

A 22-year-old moderator of the illegal platform, who was arrested in Germany at the end of 2022, remains in pre-trial custody.

In addition to the six arrested main suspects, more than 30 users of the platforms and consumers of "relevant media content" in Germany and abroad were identified by BLKA's undercover investigators.