In the Wuppertal abuse complex, the court committed a twenty-two-year-old man to a closed psychiatric ward for an indefinite period.
A 45-year-old co-accused was sentenced to six years in prison by the Wuppertal district court on Monday for serious sexual abuse and production of child pornography.
The 22-year-old committed the offenses as a minor, the presiding judge explained.
He was abused himself as a child and, at the age of 15, managed to get accepted into a diaconal institution.
Among other things, the student had sexually abused a five-month-old baby.
In 2020 he got to know the much older co-defendant via a chat portal.
The youngest victim of the forty-five year old is said to have been one year old.
Without therapy, further crimes can be expected from the twenty-two-year-old, which is why his placement in a closed psychiatric ward is essential.
He had "developed from the victim to the perpetrator with responsibility", had confessed and showed remorse.
His therapy will take at least five years and will be "very hard".
The public prosecutor's office had requested six and a half years' imprisonment and then psychiatric treatment for the twenty-two-year-old and ten years' imprisonment for the forty-five-year-old.
Suspicious chat messages in a German online portal first brought the operators and then the investigators into action.
The complex triggered investigations into more than 100 other suspects nationwide who are said to have formed a child pornography exchange ring.
The twenty-two-year-old had filmed his acts of abuse, photographed them and exchanged the recordings with others.
During searches, the investigators came across several terabytes of suspicious material.
The evaluation finally led to the identification of the affected children.
In North Rhine-Westphalia, several major crime complexes have recently come to light in which children have been subjected to sexual violence.