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Public prosecutor's office in Wuppertal (archive image)
Photo: Otto Krschak / imago images
A 22-year-old from Wuppertal is suspected of having severely sexually abused a total of four children over the years.
As the public prosecutor announced, she has already brought charges against the man before the district court.
According to the investigation, between 2016 and 2021 he repeatedly committed sexual violence against a girl and three boys, took photos and videos of them and also distributed them.
At the beginning of the abuse, the youngest victim was said to be five months old, a boy a year old, a four year old and a twelve year old.
They came from his family and private environment, but were not biological children, said a spokesman for the public prosecutor.
The investigators came across the man through conspicuous chats.
Also accused is a 44-year-old who was in contact with the 22-year-old and is said to have severely abused a one-year-old boy several times.
While the 44-year-old is in custody, the 22-year-old was placed in a psychiatric facility because he could possibly be less guilty, it said.
The two suspects were arrested last year.
When evaluating the material seized, there were also indications of proceedings against around a hundred other people who are said to have obtained the material.
Separate procedures would be successively initiated and passed on to the local law enforcement authorities, it said.
Connections to the large abuse complexes in Lügde, Münster and Bergisch-Gladbach that have been uncovered in North Rhine-Westphalia in recent years have not yet been established.
Strike in Bavaria and Saxony against child abuse
Regardless of the crimes in North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavarian investigators have carried out a major raid against child abuse.
During a so-called day of action, 50 objects were searched across the country on Tuesday, said the Bavarian Minister of the Interior, Joachim Herrmann, and the State Minister of Justice, Georg Eisenreich (both CSU), on Wednesday in Munich.
The action was directed against 55 suspects between the ages of 18 and 73.
They are said to have obtained videos showing the most severe and extremely violent abuse of infants.
"What can be seen there, this level of cruelty, of violence, even long-standing investigators cannot easily put up with," said Thomas Goger, head of the Center for Combating Child Pornography and Sexual Abuse on the Internet (ZKI).
Eisenreich said the pressure to pursue such perpetrators should be further increased.
Herrmann explained that the aim was to sustainably smash supply and demand for depictions of abuse.
Both ministers called for traffic data storage to be revived.
It is completely incomprehensible that no more data is stored in Germany, said Eisenreich.
The acts would sometimes be months or even years ago.
Experience shows that it is precisely in file-sharing networks that serious criminal offenses are committed.
If there is no way to link IP addresses and inventory data, investigations are already over before they can even begin.
The police also took action against users of child pornography in Chemnitz, Saxony.
There were searches on 36 suspects on Wednesday and last week, according to a statement.
They are said to have owned, bought or distributed child pornography.
So far no arrests have been made.
wit/dpa/AFP