Constables Wallop and Punch-Hardering of the Bavarian Landeskriminalamt have bust close to 1000 watchers and consumers of child pornography.

Inspectors over at the Landeskriminalamt, which is the state police of the federal state of Bavaria in Germany, were forwarded the address of an internet site by an Italian child protection portal, which displayed the sexual abuse of two small girls.

The two infants were abused in two seperate videos and were approximately ten and 12 years old. The cyber crimes unit went into overdrive, contacted the hoster and secured the logs. 48,000 pedophiles had visited the site and watched the two videos in the space of a mere month, from 98 different countries. The state police forwarded the log containing 41,000 data records to the Federal Police (Bundeskriminalamt). So far, 65 pedo-criminals have been arrested or busted in Poland, 38 in Australia, 53 in Turkey and 80 in Austria.

Unfortunately, only 987 suspects could be made out in Germany, which had 7500 users view the website. 130 different ISPs received requests for information, the results of which were forwarded to regional prosecutors. All in all, over one thousand PCs, 1800 child porn videos and nearly 45,000 drives were seized in Germany alone during Operation Smasher.

Prosecutors were able to save three girls from ongoing abuse by their fathers or stepfathers. Police were able to prove a 41 year old man abused his two daughters on a near daily basis in the state of Schleswig Holstein. One man was seized whilst he was downloading child pornography. Owners of child pornography merely face 15 months in jail or fines of up to 12,750 Euros and will have their hardware seized. X