A total of 41 people, 5 of them in Andalucía, have been detained in connection with child pornography and the harassment of minors.
Of those detained by the National Police, 35 are charged with the possession and distribution of child pornography via the internet, the other 6 are accused of the harassment of minors for sexual purposes, a phenomenon apparently known in the trade as ‘grooming’. The arrests took place in eleven autonomous regions, namely Madrid, Andalucía, Canarias, Cantabria, Castilla y León, Cataluña, Comunidad Valenciana, Extremadura, Baleares, País Vasco and Ceuta.
During the operation, in which more than one hundred officers took part, police seized 46 hard disks, three CPUs, ten laptops, 200 DVDs and three external memory files containing millions of photographs and videos relating to paedophilia.
The detainees are from a wide range of social and economic backgrounds and include architects, industrialists, students, airline pilots and software engineers. They were all sharing their material quite openly through P2P (Peer to Peer) networks which means that anyone could get hold of it if they were so inclined.