CYPRIOTS are believed to be on a list of more than 2,300 people to visit a recently uncovered child pornography website.
The Russian site, described by the Austrian authorities who discovered it as “the worst kind of sexual abuse of children”, has been visited by people from 77 countries, including Cypriots and Greeks, according to press reports yesterday.
A police spokeswoman said there was currently no information to prove Cypriots had been involved.
“The media says that there were Cypriots involved, but we are waiting for the facts from Interpol,” the spokeswoman said.
Visitors allegedly paid 69 euros to access the site, which investigators said featured children aged from “zero to 14”.
Austrian Chief Investigator Harald Gremel said that “screams could sometimes be heard” on the site, coming from the abused children.
The majority of the children are eastern European.
In just 24 hours, police recorded over 8,000 “hits” to the Austrian server from 2,360 computer addresses. According to the Austrian Interior Ministry, the United States tops the list with 607 visitors, followed by Germany with 466 and France with 114.
“Among the suspects we know so far, the youngest is a 17-year-old’, said Gremel at a recent news conference. “There are pupils, students, unemployed people, pensioners, craftsmen and a government employee among the suspects.”
Countries whose nationals are included on the list have now launched their own investigations. The authorities in Greece have discovered there are several Greeks among those who bought the material.
“But they cannot be prosecuted because through the investigation it emerged that they had bought the material for their personal use,” a police official told Athens newspaper Ta Nea. “It has not emerged that a Greek participated in the creation or sale of such videos.”
The investigation into the child pornography network began last July when a man working for a Vienna-based internet service informed the Interior Ministry that he had come across pornographic material during a routine check.
Erich Zwettler, an official of the Austrian Bureau of Criminal Investigation, confirmed that many of the abused children were eastern European.
“We established that most material came from eastern Europe and that most children were abused in eastern Europe,” he said. “However, there are also cases of children in Southeast Asia, especially in Sri Lanka, Korea and Vietnam,” Zwettler added, stressing the need for Interpol to set up networks in these countries to combat the abuse of children.
