• Online child pornography, 12 arrests throughout Italy
  • Child pornography, 60 arrests between Latin America, the United States and Spain
  • Child pornography on the web: three arrests and 14 suspects in Catania

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11 July 2016 Five Italian citizens have been arrested and 16 others reported for the production, dissemination and sharing of child pornography online as part of a vast anti-pedophilia operation conducted by the Police throughout the country.   

The five arrests, carried out in the context of house searches, took place in Lombardy, Tuscany, Trentino Alto Adige and Lazio. All those arrested, four of whom were uncensored and unknown to law enforcement officials, were caught detaining and sharing large quantities of child pornography with minors. The operation was born from reports from Europol and the Belgian police in September 2015, which developed by the Italian police, led to internet connections and the tracking of child pornography material exchanged and shared among the suspects. The investigations, conducted by the Postal Police Department of Basilicata with the coordination of the Postal Police and Communications Service of Rome, revealed, "also on this occasion, the transversality of the profiles of those responsible". There was, for example, an electronic expert, supervisor of a pharmaceutical company, with specific precedents dating back to 2002-2003. A generic worker, still in detention, residing with his parents, in the house of which he kept all the child pornography inside a locked room, where only he had access, and covered with posters with young-looking actresses adolescent.   

Among them, even an over seventy-year-old, cardiopathic and diabetic, former director of a post office, at whose home 21,000 files (15,000 images and 6,000 videos) were found with abuse of minors even of an early age, as well as child pornography comics, all cataloged and saved on external hard disk and pen drive.   

There was not even an electronic engineer caught in the act while he was intent on sharing a folder with 600 files on a peer-to-peer circuit. Finally, there was a pensioner, a former ecological operator, also the grandfather of two grandchildren aged 8 and 10, who used to download and store child pornography on a pen drive (well 47) found scattered throughout the apartment.