One of the world’s most prolific distributors of homosexual child pornography has been arrested, Czech police announced this week.
A dual Czech-American national, who has been described as having been at some point “among the three largest distributors of homosexual child pornography in the world,” has been arrested and will face trial.
Local police said the arrest followed a year-long operation alongside other investigations being carried out in parallel by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the EU police office (Europol).
The FBI had been monitoring the activities of the suspect for around ten years but were only recently able to determine his identity as a result of a Europol-led investigation, Le Monde reported.
Police said that the suspect “mainly distributed content created by others and gave advice about ways to sexually abuse underage boys or to distribute child sexual abuse content on the dark web.”
“Investigators in Prague managed to access a considerable quantity of data – which was originally encrypted and secure,” Czech police added.
Police spokeswoman Kristyna Zelinkova said that the suspect was initially arrested in February and was placed in pre-trial detention. He faces up to eight years in prison if convicted.
The disclosure of the arrest in the Czech Republic came as authorities in Germany also arrested six men suspected of operating a dark web platform for sharing child pornography and child sex abuse content.
The suspects in Germany, aged between 43 and 69, are alleged to have been the “leading backers” of the platform, which is said to have had hundreds of thousands of users.
North Rhine-Westphalia Minister of Interior Herbert Reul said that the case is “dizzyingly big”.