Biggest raids on child porn

Police smashed the world's biggest ever child porn ring early today, after raiding homes in 19 countries.

In a massive operation, detectives arrested 10 suspected paedophiles in Britain, including one in London, and 120 in similar raids in countries ranging from the US to Korea.

They estimate that pictures of several hundred thousand abused children are finding their way on to the internet each year. The initiative, codenamed Operation Landmark, is the result of a painstaking 10-month investigation by the National Crime Squad and follows an analysis of 16 days' internet traffic to 33 paedophile Usenet groups.

They discovered data from 9,800 individuals throughout the world who were asking for images of children - or in one case advice on how to groom a child for sexual abuse.

Operating from a secret address in south-west London, a team of officers began tracking down suspects. They found that 2,800 people had accessed the groups 10 or more times but many were "spoofing", using anonymous email addresses and could not be traced.

They traced 440 individuals and prepared evidence on 130, passing on packages including copies of the images they had downloaded to police forces in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey and the US.

Detective Superintendent Peter Spindler, who leads the NCS team, said that there was one big difference between this operation and a previous one - Cathedral - which targeted the so-called Wonderland club.

Operation Cathedral focused on closed internet groups and chatrooms not accessible to the public. The 33 Usenet groups in Landmark are public and can be easily accessed by anybody. Police are concentrating on individuals who distribute the images to others, and since the Operation Cathedral trials earlier this year, penalties have gone up. At that time, maximum sentences for possession and distribution were six months and three years. Now it is five years and 10 years.

Mr Spindler said: "The real issue here is child protection. Every image is evidence of abuse." After today's raids more than 100 suspects will have been arrested in five UK operations this year.

This morning's raids involved forces throughout Britain including the Met, Greater Manchester, Humberside, Kent, Thames Valley and Wiltshire.