OUDAM.COM

Thu Jun 5, 12:26 AM ET

SYDNEY (AFP) - Seventy men in Australia have been arrested in a global crackdown on Internet child pornography and more will be detained, police said Thursday.

The Interpol-led probe involving 170 countries was launched after a hacker posted 99 child porn images on a European website, which attracted 12 million hits in just 76 hours.

More than 2,800 computer Internet protocol (IP) addresses were traced back to Australia and federal police identified all of them in a six-month operation, Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said.

“You will see more arrests, the investigations are continuing,” Keelty told reporters.

Keelty said the first arrests were made in cases where children might be in danger and four children had been taken from their homes.

Several teachers, a federal police officer and a sports administrator were reportedly among those arrested.

“It’s really one of the largest single operations we’ve done on child pornography with our international partners and our state police partners here in Australia,” Keelty said.

“You’re talking about 12 million hits from around the world but in a small time period of three days.

“In Australia the operation has netted over a million images of children, and these are not children in passive positions, these are children who are being abused.”

The children range in age from babies to 18 years old, he said.

“They come from various countries, the real tragedy of this is that we don’t know the origins of a lot of these children.

“We don’t know whether these children are still being the victims of child abuse.”

The flood of hits on the website came after word got around online paedophile networks that the images were available and the website’s address was circulated, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Almost 150,000 different computer users from 170 countries accessed the otherwise obscure website in just 76 hours, the paper said.

The assistant director of police high tech operations, Andrew Colvin, told reporters all those arrested were men but they were impossible to stereotype.

“We’ve seen everything from teenagers, 19-year-olds, through to 80-year-olds,” he said.

“We’ve seen school teachers, police officers… people in positions of trust, positions of responsibility, farmers, bankers, pharmacists, every walk of life.”

Keelty said the child porn network was a vicious cycle.

“To get in you’ve actually got to be supplying something yourself and that means more children will be abused,” he said.

“The viewing of these images continues the abuse, it’s an horrific crime.”

The maximum penalty for possessing child pornography is 10 years in jail.

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Olaf Achleitner of Salzburg, who was arrested in September, denied the allegations and accused police of framing him.

“They were in my house but I did nothing wrong,” he told Reuters outside the courtroom as he was led away in handcuffs.

“This is a death sentence for me as an old man.”

Achleitner, who worked as a cook at a western restaurant in Phnom Penh, was also ordered to pay $1,000 (512 pounds) in compensation to the two victims.

Cambodia, a deeply impoverished southeast Asian nation, has long-been regarded as a haven for western paedophiles and perverts, although it has stepped up prosecution of foreigners in recent years.

(Reporting by Ek Madra, Editing by Ed Cropley and Sanjeev Miglani)

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Opening statements are expected today in the downtown Los Angeles trial of a jailed ex-Marine Corps captain accused of raping girls as young as 9 years old while living in Cambodia.

Michael Joseph Pepe, 54, is charged with seven counts of engaging in illicit sexual conduct in foreign places. The federal law that Pepe allegedly broke allows the prosecution of those accused of engaging in child sex tourism.

Pepe faces up to 30 years’ imprisonment if he’s convicted. He has pleaded not guilty to all counts.

Prosecutors allege that Pepe raped seven preteen girls at his Phnom Penh home beginning in the late fall of 2005 and ending shortly before his June 2006 arrest by the Cambodian National Police. In February 2007, he was extradited to Los Angeles — the last U.S. city he spent time in before returning to Cambodia after visiting his daughter.

The alleged victims are expected to testify at his trial.

Pepe, who moved to Cambodia in 2003 and married there, allegedly paid a prostitute a finder’s fee to bring him young victims, typically between the ages of nine and 15.

He also paid the young girls’ families a fee and monthly stipend for access to the girls for sexual gratification, prosecutors said. In one case, the prostitute admitted receiving $10 for finding a young girl, whose family received $300, prosecutors said.

Agents who searched Pepe’s home found rope and cloth strips used to restrain the victims, prosecutors said. They also found mind-altering drugs, condoms, Viagra, children’s clothes and newspaper articles about pedophiles, prosecutors said.

Pepe’s computer contained hundreds of images of nude and semi-clothed children, in some cases bound, performing various sex acts, prosecutors claim.

One witness expected to testify in Pepe’s defense is Dr. Michael Maloney, a defense witness in the 1980s McMartin Preschool child molestation trial.

In that trial, Maloney criticized police interview techniques of the alleged victims. He testified that they elicited erroneous information that the children had been sexually abused.

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