Condoms intervened in one of the homes, when the police operation was carried out in 2016.
The Tarragona High Court has sentenced the leader of the largest dismantled child pornography network in Spain, Jean Luc Aschbacher, to 240 years in prison, and a second person responsible for the plot, Christian Bernard Georges Arson, to 19 years.
The sentence condemns Aschbacher to 240 years in prison for recruiting minors, subjecting them to sexual abuse in which he himself participated, production and distribution of child pornography and belonging to a criminal organization.
Arson is sentenced to 19 years in prison for recruitment of minors, production and distribution of child pornography, although he considers it proven that he did not abuse the victims as his boss did.
Both convicts, of French nationality, captured vulnerable children to subject them to sexual abuse and film them in more than 300 shoots, especially in a flat in Tortosa (Tarragona), although they also traveled as sex tourists to Thailand, among other countries. .
The victims amount to more than a hundred, although only 18 between 11 and 16 years of age were identified, some of them protected by the General Directorate of Child and Adolescent Care of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
The network acted undetected for more than 15 years, camouflaged under the legal company Productos Aschbacher, until the suspicions of a DGAIA employee triggered an investigation by the Mossos d'Esquadra.
The Mossos arrested seven men involved in the network in 2015 and, although they were imprisoned, they were released on bail after a few months.
Aschbacher, Arson and a third defendant, Youness en Naciri, who is still wanted, fled before the trial, held at the Tarragona Court in 2019. The two convicted were now arrested in May last year in France, were tried last February and were placed in preventive detention in prison due to the risk of escape until a sentence was handed down.
The other four involved who were tried in 2019 by the High Court appealed their sentences to the Supreme Court, which substantially increased them by appreciating that the production and distribution of child pornography is a continuing crime.
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