Two Bangladeshi brothers were arrested by Italian police after being accused of blackmailing a woman with sexual material they had stolen from her mobile phone after she had brought it to them to repair.
The two Bangladeshis, aged 19 and 35, were arrested by the Carabinieri in the city of Ancona in eastern Italy and are accused of abusing their 20-year-old victim for months and blackmailing her into performing sexual acts for them.
The alleged abuse started in 2020 when the young woman brought her mobile phone to be fixed after damaging the glass of her smartphone. Instead of just replacing the screen, the brothers delved into the phone’s storage and discovered sexual videos of the girl and her former boyfriend, newspaper Il Giornale reports.
Using the videos to blackmail the young girl, the men are said to have forced her into sexual acts from August 2020 to March 2021. According to the report, the pair kept on making new graphic videos of the girl — given her age, this was child pornography in Italian law — until the victim refused to cooperate any longer.
At that point, the two men began sending the sexually explicit videos to their own friends and threatened the lives of her parents. Last March, the girl and her family reported the events to police and handed over phone data. Officers launched an investigation, which led to the arrest of the pair on May 8th.
Both migrants are accused of engaging in revenge pornography, possession of child pornography, dissemination of sexually explicit material and other charges.
Similar cases of sexual blackmail have been reported in several other countries across Europe in recent years. In 2021, several Afghan migrants were accused of blackmailing underage girls as young as 13 in Sweden after filming themselves engaging in sexual activity with them and circulating pictures and videos on social media.
“It has since been used to get the young girls to perform more actions that they were not comfortable with. It became a way of pressuring plaintiffs into doing more, but also to make sure that the girls do not tell anyone about what they have been through. They threatened to publish the pictures and films,” prosecutor Andreas Lennartsson stated at the time.
That same year, a 22-year-old man was arrested in the Paris no-go suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis after also blackmailing underage girls for sex on social media, through the app Snapchat, and had threatened to send sexually explicit pictures and videos of the minors to their families or to post them on pornographic websites.
Last December, the serial blackmailer Abdul Elahi, who targetted as many as 2,000 victims, forcing them to engage in harming themselves as well as child abuse, was jailed after admitting to a total of 158 charges against him involving 72 victims.
The 26-year-0ld is said to have abused around 550 British victims, both adults and children, but is thought to have abused victims from at least 30 different countries overall. He was sentenced to 32 years in prison but is expected to be eligible for release after serving just two-thirds of his sentence.