Major International Child Pornography Ring Uncovered in Austria

In July 2006, a man working for an Internet file hosting service based in Vienna approached authorities at the Interior Ministry and told them that during a routine check, he had notice some disturbing pornographic material. An investigation was launched immediately with a team led by Harald Gremel, an Austrian police expert on Internet crime.

The man who had notified the authorities blocked access to the videos, and then he recorded the IP addresses of all the people who continued trying to download the material. He gave that information to the authorities. Within a 24-hour period, investigators recorded more than 8,000 hits to the website from over 2,360 different computer IP addresses. Gremel told reporters that the addresses were from 77 different countries ranging from Algeria to South Africa, including the United States.

Neither the informant nor the Internet hosting service he worked for were named to the media, and authorities said that neither were being implicated as part of the investigation.

The videos being downloaded were posted on a Russian website, but investigators believe the videos were made in Eastern Europe and uploaded to the site from somewhere in the Britain. Users of the site had to pay $89 to access the material, Gremel said, which included images of girls and boys up to age 14.

The most disturbing aspect of the investigation was the nature of the videos themselves. Gremel said that "girls could be seen being raped, and you could hear screams." Officials initially said that the children in the videos ranged in age from "0 to 14," gut Gremel recanted that statement later, saying that no infants were seen in the videos. Gremel could not provide information about ongoing investigations outside Austria, but he said that his department’s cooperation with Russian authorities had intensified over the past two weeks as the further information was collected.

Interior Minister Guenther Platter said that the FBI is investigating about 600 suspects in the United States, France is looking into about 100 suspects, and authorities in Germany, which had the largest number of suspects in Europe, are looking into leads on about 400 people. At least 23 of the suspects were Austrians, Platter said. However, authorities said that none of the Austrian suspects are yet in custody. Austrian officials shared their information with law enforcement agencies around the world in hopes that all of the suspects could be investigated and arrested.

Platter said that the videos, which were seized by Austria’s Federal Criminal Investigations Bureau, included images showing "the worst kind of child sexual abuse."