North Rhine-Westphalia: Man from Wermelskirchen is said to have sexually abused at least twelve children

There was talk of a new dimension of violence when the first information about the latest major abuse complex became known over the weekend.

Investigators said that the videos and pictures secured from a 44-year-old man from Wermelskirchen documented violent excesses of a previously unimagined kind.

"I am shocked and stunned," said Cologne police chief Falk Schnabel on Monday when he explained the investigations by the special organizational structure (BAO) called "List" that had been ongoing since December for the first time.

"I have never encountered such a level of inhuman brutality and callous indifference to the suffering of young children, their pain and screams, their obvious fear."

Pure burger

Political correspondent in North Rhine-Westphalia.

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The man from Wermelskirchen is said to have sexually abused at least twelve children between the ages of one month and 14 in the past few years.

Because the man also hoarded enormous amounts of videos and pictures, the investigators have already tracked down numerous other suspected pedophiles in 14 federal states.

Schnabel fears that the new case will not only join other cases such as the abuse complexes in Münster and Bergisch Gladbach, but will go beyond them.

In recent years, North Rhine-Westphalian investigators have been able to clear up several abuse complexes.

One of the largest proceedings to date - the Bergisch Gladbach case - is being conducted by the Cologne police headquarters, like the Wermelskirchen case.

The special organizational structure "Berg" has already identified more than 400 suspects.

By the beginning of the year there had been 27 arrests, 13 of them in North Rhine-Westphalia.

The work of BAO “Berg” is still not finished.

The starting point for the latest large-scale proceedings in Cologne were investigations in Berlin, during which the suspect from Wermelskirchen was also discovered by evaluating relevant chats.

The 44-year-old man is said to have gained access to children as a babysitter in the Cologne area for years, which he then tormented and raped.

At the beginning of December, special police forces raided the man's house in order to surprise him directly with his open computer and thus gain access to his memory.

Investigators have known for a long time that pedo-criminals are pathological hunters and gatherers.

However, the enormous amount of data secured in Wermelskirchen exceeded all previous dimensions.

It took more than two weeks to make backup copies of the enormous amounts of photos and videos stored on various data carriers and servers on the spot.

30 terabytes of data have been secured, says senior public prosecutor Ulrich Bremer.

"If you imagine that one terabyte is roughly a stack of paper 15 miles high, you get a sense of the magnitude of the fall."

Films and photos go back to 1993

The films and photos collected by the confessed pedophile date back to 1993, according to metadata.

While investigators in other abuse complexes often come across numerous harmless family or leisure time recordings, in the Wermelskirchen case there is “no leeway for interpretation”, as the first chief inspector Jürgen Haese put it.

The new Cologne BAO got its name "List" because the investigators also found several detailed lists on the man, which he had apparently created in order to somehow keep track of the flood of his terrible pictures.

In addition, the man meticulously kept records of other perpetrators, their addresses and sexual preferences.

Thanks to the recordings, the investigators were able to identify 73 other suspected pedophiles in quick succession.

It is likely that there will be many, many more.

So far, the BAO "list" has only been able to evaluate a small part of the confiscated material.

The police and the public prosecutor's office have so far not been able to identify any overlaps with the "Berg" case.

The BAO "list" has nothing to do with a group of perpetrators networked in chat groups, as in previous abuse complexes, says senior public prosecutor Bremer.

The man from Wermelskirchen has apparently had individual contacts with other pedophiles for a long time.