Child pornography, a scourge that continues to increase

The Civil Guard of La Rioja made public this Friday the arrest of a 22-year-old man who tricked 8 and 9-year-old girls to obtain images of a sexual nature. Unfortunately, this type of case has many more replicas than a healthy society would like to admit. In the last year, there are several notorious operations that have been carried out to fight against pedophilia and child pornography in La Rioja. These are the most relevant.

In January of this same 2024, the National Police detailed the ins and outs of ‘Operation Galeón’, in which a 20-year-old man of Colombian nationality had been arrested in Navarrete for possession of child pornography.

In the search carried out at the home of the detained young man, the agents had located files of child sexual content on his devices, as well as technical evidence that confirmed the facts.

The operation had begun as a result of active cyber patrolling, thanks to which a foreign entity fighting against the sexual exploitation of minors on the Internet detected a shared link in an online file-sharing system application. In it, a person automatically made hundreds of files of explicit child pornography available to unknown third parties, with unequivocal titles that referred to said subject.

A case that unleashed social alarm in La Rioja was the one that was uncovered in December 2023. It was then that it was learned that a teacher from a school in Logroño had been arrested for, allegedly, sending messages of a sexual nature and making requests for content intimate to a Primary student from the center itself. The teacher, approximately 40 years old, was released with charges while the investigation continued, which began when private conversations that he was having were discovered in the minor’s home through an educational platform used by teachers and students.

The messages included intimate conversations, requests for private photographs and videos, and racy messages, even on weekends, asking the student what clothes she was wearing or telling her about the good grades he would give her for the content shared. All of them, completely far from a purely educational relationship despite the fact that they were carried out in a virtual environment usually used by teachers and students to communicate in their classroom tasks.

Once the conversations were discovered, the family took photographs of all of them and put them in the hands of the Police when they reported the case that same night, in addition to granting access to the terminals involved in these contacts. Subsequently, the teacher, according to family sources, eliminated the conversations with the minor, which dated back to September, when the new school year started. They do not know if they had similar contacts in previous years.

A few months earlier, also in Logroño, the National Police arrested a 47-year-old individual of Colombian nationality in the so-called ‘Operation Mensa’ for possession of child pornography.

During the search of the detainee’s home, the agents located the child pornography files on his devices and also found a link in an application that contained 1.50 Gb divided into 349 video and photograph files.

Once again as a result of active cyber patrolling of the Internet, a foreign entity fighting against the sexual exploitation of minors on the Internet had detected a file-sharing link in which a person made hundreds of files of explicit child pornography available to unknown third parties. .

Another case was the arrest in Calahorra, by the National Police, in August 2023, of a man who allegedly contacted minors through social networks to obtain sexual images. The investigation began after the father of a minor in Seville filed a complaint regarding multimedia files of sexual content on his son’s phone. He explained that he had maintained a virtual relationship for several weeks with a man who had posed as a minor on the networks.

The groomer contacted the victim talking about video games through a social network. Later, the issues transcended to the personal level and she began to receive images of sexual content and was encouraged to share the same type of files.

During the house search in Calahorra, the agents seized four mobile phones, two computers, a hard drive, a pen drive and a game console. The analysis of these devices showed that the detainee contacted minors through various social media profiles to obtain sexual images. In addition, a large number of pedophile videos and photographs of naked children that the arrested man had allegedly captured without consent on the beach were detected. And it was detected that he was in instant messaging conversation groups in which material with sexual content involving minors was exchanged.

Also in August, the National Police arrested a 60-year-old resident of Logroño for possession of child pornography, in the so-called ‘Operation Sirio’. During the search carried out at the detainee’s home, the agents located numerous files of child pornography on the devices he used. The investigation carried out began as a result of police cyber patrolling of the network.

During the search carried out, various computer material was seized for study, including two computers and various hard drives and pen drives where the detainee stored child pornographic content.

In June, another case was detected in Fuenmayor, where the National Police arrested a man as the alleged perpetrator of a crime of corruption of minors. The arrested person requested videos of sexual content from a minor through social networks.

The complaint had been filed in the Canary Islands several months earlier by a ten-year-old boy accompanied by his parents. According to the victim, she had met a man, supposedly 20 years old, with whom, after starting a friendship, she had had frequent conversations through different applications and social networks, until at one point the accused began to request audiovisual content. of a sexual nature.

The victim also reported extortion, since he was threatened by the detainee to go to his town in the Canary Islands and harm him, while at the same time publishing the conversations held between them.

Shortly before, in April, ‘Operation Viper’ was made public, which resulted in the arrest of a 60-year-old man, a resident of Logroño, for the crime of possession of child pornography. In the search carried out at the arrested man’s home, the agents located thousands of files containing abundant child pornography on the devices that he had been using for a long time, as well as numerous technical evidence, computers and hard drives that confirmed the facts.

The investigation began as a result of active police cyber patrolling of the Network, thanks to which the movement of files containing child sexual abuse content was detected in a file-sharing network system.

After the police investigation, the agents tracked down the person responsible for distributing the content in a home located in Logroño, where the author lived alone. There they seized various computer equipment, two computers and various hard drives and pendrives where the detainee stored child pornographic content.

In March 2023, the National Police reported that it was investigating two men, a Spaniard and a Dominican, aged 68 and 55 and residing in Logroño, who were viewing images of child pornography at their workplace, a company in Logroño.

The computer devices they had at work were intervened and, although they were aware that there was an investigation in progress, they managed to recover some of the files previously deleted by one of the authors and with which the veracity of the information could be verified. these facts.