(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Seventy-two members of an online website called Dreamboard have been charged with sexually exploiting children aged from 12 to as young as infants.
Fifty two arrests were made in the United States and in other countries following an extreme international investigation that began in 2009. The identities of the other 20 remain unknown at the time.
According to the US federal officials, in order to become part of the online community, members were required to upload pornographic images and video footage of children under 12 years old, and their access was upgraded as they provided more content.
About 600 men belonged to the members-only online bulletin board, which authorities say encouraged and rewarded members who sexually abused young children and made them cry.
"To give you an example of the scope of this forum, the capture and analysis of the forum revealed that the board may have been the vehicle for the distribution of up to 123 terabytes of child pornography, which is roughly equivalent to nearly 16,000 DVDs,” US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said.
“Additional media recovered from the targets arrested in the United States alone has been found to contain over one million images of child pornography,” Napolitano added.
Four of the individuals arrested -- residents of Illinois, Alabama, Florida and Kentucky -- have already pleaded guilty, receiving sentences of more than 20 years in prison.
Those arrested outside the United States were rounded up in Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Germany, Hungary, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Qatar, Serbia, Sweden and Switzerland.
The US is the top producer of pornographic web pages by far, with 244,661,900 online pages or 89 percent of the total number of the unethical websites across the globe. Every 39 minutes, a new pornographic video is created in the US.
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