The National Police has dismantled one of the largest national networks of distribution of child pornography breaking up fourteen WhatsApp groups through which the paedophile topic of extreme brutality was distributed involving children from 0 to 8 years old. With local arrests made in Torrevieja and Valencia.
The operation, led by the National Police, with the collaboration of Interpol and Europol, also involved international connections in America and Europe, but resulted in 19 detainees in Spain alone. Devices containing more than 16 terabytes of information holding about 2,400,000 files of child pornography have been seized, according to a police statement.
The investigations led to the detection of fourteen chat groups, 58 users and huge amounts of shared files and as well as an extensive operation in Spain, it was found that the instant messaging system extended its networks to 7 other countries across Europe and America.
The Spanish arrests took place simultaneously in Torrevieja, Valencia, Oviedo, Barcelona, Burgos, Cordoba, Granada, Palma de Mallorca, Jaén, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, León, Madrid , Murcia, Santander, Tarragona, Teruel and Valladolid.
The involved the intervention of 18 courts that authorised, in a coordinated and simultaneous operation, nineteen home raids in which eleven laptops, twenty three mobile phones, four tablets, eleven external hard drives, seven flash drives and five memory cards were confiscated containing over 2,400,000 multimedia files of child pornography.
