The police called the operation “Police2Pédo”.
An evocative code name to designate this anti-pedophile net of rare magnitude in France.
According to corroborating sources, no less than sixty people suspected of downloading and viewing child pornography images and videos were arrested between Monday and Thursday morning throughout the country by the judicial police.
Around thirty departments are concerned, including Ile-de-France, Tarn-et-Garonne, Loire-Atlantique, Ain, Pas-de-Calais, Isère and even Hérault.
These investigations, launched and coordinated by the Central Office for the Repression of Violence against Persons (OCRVP) of the Central Directorate of the Judicial Police, target Internet users of peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading pedophile networks.
It is a system of direct file exchange between users, without recourse to servers as intermediaries, often used for illegal purposes.
According to our information, OCRVP investigators traced the suspects' connections and identified their IP addresses using US-designed surveillance software.
Suspects with sensitive profiles
The sixty suspects have been taken into police custody and some of them have already been brought to justice for prosecution or indictment.
Numerous house searches have been carried out, resulting in the seizure of more than 67 computers, phones or tablets, 100 external hard drives, 120 USB keys or CDs… The first computer examinations are cold in the spine: in addition to the hundreds of thousands of sordid photos or videos featuring children, the police discovered rape of minors targeting at least four suspects on preciously preserved media.
The latter therefore saw their charges worsened in the context of incidental proceedings.
But that number of suspected rapes could increase over digital exploitations.
“The idea was to kick in the anthill to fight against child pornography and show that there is a constant vigilance and vigilance,” explains divisional commissioner Eric Berot, head of the OCRVP.
We have targeted the most dangerous and disturbing profiles, it is not just a question of consultations by chance.
One of the suspects had even downloaded more than 170 terra bytes of data!
Among the alleged pedophiles are people with a so-called "sensitive" profession, that is to say in contact with children: educators, teachers, town hall officials ... Others have already been convicted by the courts for pedophile offenses - assaults or rapes on minors and detentions of child pornography - and are therefore potentially in recidivism.
Thus, on the sixty suspects, at least 13 are already known for such facts and registered in the file of delinquents and sexual criminals (FIJAIS).
The ages of the respondents range from 28 to 75, some still living with their parents.
Each time, investigators must verify whether the suspect is the one who viewed the prohibited images.
“It has happened that certain devices are used without the knowledge of their owner, observes a relative of the file.
This is sometimes the case in families, the elderly do not protect their IP address.
In the lot, we also find a couple in their forties from Le Havre, who together consulted the pedophile content.
Educator, imam, computer scientist ...
This anti-pedophile crackdown mobilized nearly 220 judicial police officials.
It began Monday morning at dawn, especially in Val-de-Marne, where the brigade for the protection of minors (BPM) of the Parisian PJ picked up a 54-year-old computer scientist, father of a family.
The analysis of its computer equipment allowed the discovery of more ... than 110,000 child pornography images and 2,000 videos of child sexual abuse.
Before investigators, the man also admitted to raping his 14-year-old daughter since the age of nine, which led to him being indicted by a judge in Créteil and imprisoned at the end of his custody on sight.
The arrests - around forty - then multiplied during the day on Tuesday by all the DIPJs in France - Lyon or Montpellier for example - with the support of the OCRVP.
In Normandy, it is… an imam of a mosque who was arrested with various pedophile files on his computer.
In Loire-Atlantique, investigators discovered during a search of a target a video showing him sexually assaulting a seven-year-old child of his family.
Finally on Wednesday, it is a sports educator from eastern France who was confused with rape films being identified.
Sequences shot in the locker room of his workplace without the knowledge of the victims were also exhumed.
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The “Police2Pédo” operation was initially scheduled at the start of the year but had to be postponed due to the health crisis.
