Dutch Say a Sex Ring Used Infants on Internet

July 19, 1998

Dutch Say a Sex Ring Used Infants on Internet

By MARLISE SIMONS

MSTERDAM, Netherlands -- In a case that investigators called nauseating, the Dutch police said they had discovered a ring of traders in child pornography whose images of abuse of even infants were peddled via the Internet and other media to clients in Europe, Russia and the United States.
The police said they found out about the ring after one of its members was killed several weeks ago, apparently by a rival. They said they were still sorting through thousands of digital images stored on computer disks and other material, and through hundreds of addresses of suspected suppliers and clients. They said the cache of pedophiliac material was probably the largest they had ever seized.
The case has provided new fuel for groups that have been demanding Europe-wide legislation for restrictions on the Internet.
Child pornography is a burning issue in Europe, particularly in Belgium and France, where abused and slain children have been the focus of scandals in the last few years. Several European countries have passed laws to curb child pornography and "sex tourism." These laws allow the police to arrest citizens of their countries for using children or adolescents sexually, even if they did so as far away as Africa or Asia.
The newly discovered ring operated from a small Dutch town, Zandvoort, and from Berlin, the police said, explaining that they had known of it for about a month. It became a heated topic of public debate only Thursday, after a Belgian television station reported on the case.
As a result, on Friday European officials discussed allotting new funds to fight child pornography. The foreign minister of Austria, the country that is presently chairman of the European Union, said the "disgusting" cases of child abuse showed the need for action affecting the whole of Europe. Also Friday, the German government named a task force to fight the practice at home. A spokesman called on the police to name more experts to scan the Internet for pedophiliac material.
"The Internet is not a lawless space," the German spokesman said. "We must widen our search for these criminals."
The photographs and short films found by the police are extremely shocking, said one psychologist who is a police consultant. "For professional reasons I have seen a lot of such porn," he said, "but this left me speechless. It looks like the perpetrators are not dealing with human beings but with objects." Some of the children being abused are infants and toddlers, he said.
The police said they had also found voluminous records of what appear to be clients and suppliers from countries including Israel, Ukraine, Britain, Russia and the United States. They said they believed that some of the photographed children were from Eastern Europe, while some of the short films were made on the Portuguese island of Madeira.
Investigators said they found the material in June, in an apartment whose owner had been found dead in Italy. The man, a 49-year-old German, owned a computer store in the Dutch city of Haarlem. The police, notified by his relatives, searched his apartment, where they found computers and disks.
But it was not until a week later that they realized what kind of business the man had run. Burglars caught breaking into the apartment proved to be his collaborators trying to safeguard the material.
Since then investigators have turned up another distribution point, in Berlin.

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