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PAEDOPHILE

Man arrested over huge child porn stash

Police in Spain arrested a man with one of the biggest collections of child pornography ever seized there, with more than 800,000 images of violent abuse including bestiality, authorities said Wednesday.

Published: 5 December 2013 09:41 CET
Man arrested over huge child porn stash
The man "had a collection of 846,000 picture and video files in which minors appeared, many of them younger than 13. File Photo: Elvert Barnes

“It is one of the biggest known seizures in Spain and surrounding countries of paedophiliac material in the possession of one person who shared it,” a spokesman for the Civil Guard told AFP.

The man “had a collection of 846,000 picture and video files in which minors appeared, many of them younger than 13, being victims of physical and sexual violence, including acts related to bestiality and sadomasochism”, a police statement said.

The suspect has been charged with possessing and distributing child pornography on the Internet, it added.

“He also had a manual of 170 pages, written in English, with advice on searching for minors and techniques for abusing them without being detected,” police said.

Officers raided the man’s homes in Madrid and the northern city of Valladolid, after a tip-off from the US Department of Homeland Security which had detected a user in Spain exchanging child porn by email, the statement added.

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CATHOLIC CHURCH

At least 3,000 paedophiles active in French church since 1950: report

Thousands of paedophiles have operated inside the French Catholic Church since 1950, the head of an independent commission investigating the scandal told AFP, days ahead of the release of its report.

Published: 3 October 2021 09:16 CEST
French archbishop Cardinal Philippe Barbarin leads his last mass,on June 28, 2020. Barbarin was released on appeal on January 30 for his silence on the sexual abuse of a priest, and resigned quickly afterwards.
French archbishop Cardinal Philippe Barbarin leads his last mass,on June 28, 2020. Barbarin was released on appeal on January 30 for his silence on the sexual abuse of a priest, and resigned quickly afterwards. Photo: Jeff Pachoud/AFP

The commission’s research had uncovered between 2,900 and 3,200 paedophile priests or other members of the church, said Jean-Marc Sauve, adding that it was “a minimum estimate”.

The commission’s report is due to be released on Tuesday after two and a half years of research based on church, court and police archives, as well as interviews with witnesses.

The report, which Sauve said runs to 2,500 pages, will attempt to quantify both the number of offenders and the number of victims.

It will also look into “the mechanisms, notably institutional and cultural ones” within the Church which allowed paedophiles to remain, and will offer 45 proposals.

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The independent commission was set up in 2018 by the French Catholic Church in response to a number of scandals that shook the Church in France and worldwide.

Its formation also came after Pope Francis passed a landmark measure obliging those who know about sex abuse in the Catholic Church to report it to their superiors.

Made up of 22 legal professionals, doctors, historians, sociologists and theologians, its brief was to investigate allegations of child sex abuse by clerics dating back to the 1950s.

When it began its work it called for witness statements and set up a telephone hotline, then reported receiving thousands of messages in the months that followed.

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