A man of American and Irish nationality has been sentenced to 27 years in prison in the United States for harboring millions of pedophile images on the dark web, the clandestine version of the internet, the US Department of Justice announced on Thursday (September 16th). Justice.
Read alsoHired killer, dark web and bitcoins: a 2.0 crime avoided
Eric Marques, 36, "
was one of the largest distributors of child pornography in the world,
" said federal prosecutor Jonathan Lenzner, quoted in a statement. It has "
hosted and helped share millions of horrific images and videos of child abuse
," he added. From July 2008 to July 2013, he oversaw a dark web service that hosted more than 200 pedophile sites, some of which contained images of rape or sadistic acts on infants or very young children, according to the ministry. Nearly two million of these images were unknown to investigators.
Eric Marques was arrested in Ireland in 2013 during a large police operation, involving the American federal police but also Europol, and extradited to the United States in 2019. He had pleaded guilty on February 6, 2020, thus avoiding himself a trial. The years spent in preventive detention will be taken into account, but he will have to pay 87,000 dollars, decided Wednesday the judge Theodore Chuang, responsible for fixing the sentence.
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/KMEYMJKESBAZBE4MRBAM4TGHIQ.jpg)
