Probe on
Italo - Russian Child Pornography Ring Expands.
September 29, 2000 - by Christopher Emsden - Italy Daily Staff
A probe into a child pornography
ring is set to expand as investigators said Thursday there may be grounds to
press murder charges in some cases.
Prosecutors in Torre Annunziata, near Naples, the nation on Wednesday when they
announced they and Russian iuvnestigators had cracked an Italo Russian racket
that produced and sold child pornographym some of it brutal and even murderous.
Eight Italians were arrested and more than 1,700 people were put under investigation,
but police said thousands more had contacted a decoy web site set up during
the 19 month probe.
Prosecutors also said they had evidence that buyers might in some instances
have been asked to pay before the goods were actually produced. If that proved
true, they added, some pornography users could face charges of commissioning
murder.
Several of the thousands of tapes and digital disks seized during police searches
of 600 homes included scenes in which minors - many of them orphans or kidnap
victims and some as young as two years old - were raped and, in the case of
one 10 milion lire video, apparently killed.
Prosecutors said they believed that four or five of the children who appear
in the video material might be Italians, but said the lack of a data base of
missing children made it difficult to prove that. Russian police said many of
the children were kidnapped from local orphanages or even in local parks.
Prosecutors, led by Alfredo Ormanni, hope to learn more today when they interrogate
the eight men arrested for possession of child pornography, all of whom are
being held in sepatate cells in Naples' Poggioreale prison.
The arrests mark an impressive feat in a battle against a grisly but booming
industry. A special police unit set up to combat pedophilia and led by Alessio
Distinto was able to tinfiltrate the network in Italy to the point of intercepting
packages arriving by mail and then delivering them while dressed as postal workers
and carrying hidden cameras.
The probe began when Father Fortunato Di Noto, a parish priest in Sicily who
runs Telefono Arcobaleno, a children's defense hotline, alerted magistrates
of a particularly violent online pornography ring. Father Di Noto, who said
his volunteer group had identified and reported 24,000 web sites for pedophiles,
called on Thursday for the creation of a government data base of all missing
children, and for laws that would require Internet servers to register all visitors
to their sites. Captain Distinto said more than 300 people had been charged
in the past year for possession of child pornography, and 1,000 put under investigation.