A pedophile has entered a prison in Colombia after being caught filming naked minors on the beaches of Sitges and Barcelona.
The analysis of a mobile phone seized by the Mossos d'Esquadra has revealed that the suspect, Carlos Andrés M., had recorded at least 760 videos of children between the ages of 2 and 12 naked while bathing in public play areas.
Of all of them, 16 were recorded on the Catalan beaches during a vacation.
The suspect fled to his country, where he has finally been arrested.
The police detected the defendant for the first time in Catalonia on July 20, 2021. “A police force from the Barcelona Urban Guard is preventively monitoring the beaches, and discovers him surreptitiously recording a child leaving the beach and he is naked”, explains the foreman of the Mossos Virginia López, from the central computer crime unit of the Mossos that has handled the case.
When the city police approached him, "he gets nervous, touches his mobile, and images of child pornography appear."
The man was arrested and an investigation was launched.
A week later, the same man was again identified by the police.
In this case, by the Mossos d'Esquadra, and on a beach in Sitges.
"Two people observed a man with a go pro camera," says the foreman, and focusing on naked children, for which they notified the police.
The agents identified him, intervened his camera and a telephone, and notified the duty court.
When the information reached the computer crime unit, they related it to the previous case in Barcelona, and efforts to locate it began.
“When we managed to find out where he was staying in Barcelona, we found out that he had left in a hurry,” recalls López.
He even waived the refund for the remaining 10 days that he had paid in advance.
In addition to trying to find his whereabouts, the Mossos, with the authorization of the court, began an exhaustive analysis of the two phones and the go pro camera.
In the first of the two mobile phones that intervened, they found 760 videos of minors between the ages of 2 and 12 bathing naked in public areas.
They also found 100 internet videos of grooming minors.
Of the 760, 16 were recorded on the Catalan beaches.
The rest, the Mossos managed through metadata and images to locate them in a specific municipality in Colombia, in Sabaneta, in an area with public fountains.
“He had a camera with a very powerful zoom and he captured the minors who were playing naked in that fountain”, details the foreman.
But not only.
"We have located the recruitment of minors inside homes, which must have been done from some kind of balcony," adds inspector Ricard Doña, head of the central computer crime unit of the Mossos.
To finish clearing up doubts, in the images they also discovered a flag that corresponds to that of the municipality of Sabaneta.
With all this data, and a close collaboration with Colombia, they managed to send all the information they had through Interpol.
“They were gigabytes and gigabytes, which cannot be sent by mail.
You have to do it safely," says Doña, who highlights the "fluid and constant communication" with the country.
In August of this year, they exchanged the latest data with Colombia.
Yesterday the country's Prosecutor's Office reported the arrest and preventive detention of the suspect.
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