Two people have been sentenced and two others will be tried for having downloaded hundreds of thousands of child pornography images and videos, following an unprecedented operation against pedocrime in Meurthe-et-Moselle, announced this Friday 23 September the public prosecutor, François Pérain.
Five people had initially been placed in police custody but one of them, the son of one of the defendants, was finally cleared, he said at a conference. Press.
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Tried before the Nancy court during an appearance on prior acknowledgment of guilt (CRPC, guilty plea), two people, a 64-year-old retiree and a 53-year-old temporary worker unknown to the courts, were sentenced to 12 and 14 months in prison with probation, said the prosecutor.
The first had downloaded "
between 2019 and 2022
" 666 child pornography images and 238 videos.
The second had downloaded "
between April 2021 and September 2022
" 30,000 videos and 228,000 photos, he said.
Sentenced for child pornography
The court issued against them a treatment order, a ban on contact with minors and their registration on the file of perpetrators of sexual or violent offenses (Fijais).
The other two people will be tried in immediate appearance, said François Pérain.
One, a 57-year-old man working in home help, already convicted for similar acts, had erased all the files but their download had left "
traces
" detected by the investigators, said François Pérain.
The last, a 57-year-old interim, had downloaded 64,000 files from January to August this year.
Also convicted of child pornography, he had also been convicted of sexual assault and is in legal recidivism.
These four men did not know each other and did not form a network, specified the magistrate.
“Targeting paid off”
It was the gendarmes of the cybercrime cell of the research section (SR) of Metz who identified these four people during an operation which mobilized around thirty soldiers, indicated Colonel Denis Hebinger, head of the SR, and Lieutenant-Colonel Stéphanie Serrat, in charge of the judicial police at the Meurthe-et-Moselle gendarmerie group.
“
We arrive at the rather impressive number of more than 300,000 files present on computer media (…) the targeting has borne fruit
”, welcomed Colonel Hebinger.
This dragnet is the result of an "
initiative
" operation on the part of the Nancy prosecutor's office, a "
first
" for the jurisdiction.
It was made possible "
because the gendarmerie has acquired special skills
", in particular computer skills, "
which it did not have three or four years ago
" and which make it possible to very quickly detect downloads of child pornography files. , which include a particular encoding, identifiable as a signature, specified François Pérain.
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This operation "
is a first draft
", warned Lieutenant-Colonel Serrat.
"
There will be others, we will ramp up (...) as much as necessary
".
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