Australian Federal Police (AFP) arrested 44 men and rescued 16 children from harm in a nationwide crackdown on alleged child abuse offenders.
The police described the content shared by the alleged abusers as abhorrent. The confiscated material from the offenders even include a horrific video of the rape of an 18-month-old.
In a statement released on Friday, AFP said those alleged offenders are facing a total of 350 charges of possessing child exploitation material.
The year-long investigation dubbed, Operation Molto, was launched when the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE) was referred to a law enforcement report showing thousands of offenders with a cloud storage platform to share child material abuse online.
The operation has led to arrests in every Australian state, with alleged offenders aged between 19 and 57 years old, employed in a range of occupations, including construction, transport, law enforcement and hospitality.
Some of the alleged perpetrators are accused of making their own child exploitation videos. Several others were in possession of materials made by a man previously arrested in 2015 as part of an earlier sting called “Niro”. Operation Niro was a crackdown on an organised international pedophile syndicate in 2015.
AFP Commmissioner Reece Kershaw told The Sydney Morning Herald that arresting the offenders and putting them before the court is only half the battle. He assured that defending the victims remain their foremost priority. He also confirmed to the media that ACCE’s victim identification team is relentlessly working toward identifying and rescuing them.
“Viewing, distributing or producing child exploitation material is a crime. Children are not commodities and the AFP and its partner agencies work around-the-clock to identify and prosecute offenders.”
In the past 12 months alone, the ACCCE has intercepted and examined more than 250,000 child abuse material files.
Story compiled with assistance from The Australian, Xinhua News Agency and wire reports
