Around thirty men were arrested in France as part of an operation relating to the downloading and dissemination of “particularly violent” child criminal content carried out by the Minors Office (Ofmin), the General Directorate of the National Police (DGPN) indicated on Wednesday June 24, confirming information from RTL.
The suspects are aged “37 to 79 years” and “from all socio-professional categories, including retired people”, according to the source, which specifies that “some of them were already known for acts of the same nature”. “For this operation, Ofmin and its territorial branches took into account individuals with the most sensitive profiles,” added the DGPN. They were arrested in the North, Haut-Rhin, Rhône, Ain, Drôme, Calvados and Mayenne in particular, according to RTL and Le Parisien.
The Evry public prosecutor’s office indicated that two people had been arrested in Essonne in this case. Around a hundred investigators were mobilized for this coordinated operation, “organized by the Minors Office with local assistance from police services and gendarmerie units”, detailed the police management.
Possession, distribution and consultation of child pornography content
They were placed in police custody for habitual possession, distribution and consultation of child pornography. The outcome of the procedure will be decided by the territorially competent prosecutor’s office according to the domicile of each suspect, it was added. These men are suspected of having “downloaded or distributed particularly violent child criminal content online”, it was pointed out.
Among these videos are images of the rape accompanied by torture of an 18-month-old girl and two girls aged 11 and 12, made in the Philippines in 2012, according to Le Parisien and RTL. The author of this video, Peter Scully, an Australian, was sentenced to life in prison in 2018 and then to 129 years in 2022 in the Philippines, notably for sexual violence against children and young adolescent girls. His partner, Lovely Margallo, was sentenced to 126 years in prison.
Peter Scully, now in his sixties, had created an online pornography business in the Philippines, where he had settled, filming teenage girls from poor families with whom he had sexual relations or on whom he used objects. He was arrested in 2015. According to the Philippine police, the country has become a hub for international child crime trafficking on the Internet, with the perpetrators taking advantage of the poverty of the population.
