SPAIN: Five hundred people were arrested yesterday - 19 of them in Spain - in simultaneous raids in 12 countries across Europe and Latin America
The raids were co-ordinated by Spain's Guardia Civil as part of an international operation against child pornography. Spanish interior minister José Antonio Alonso described the operation as very important. He said it was still ongoing and further arrests are expected.
Police seized more than 20,000 items, including videos, photographs, cameras and computer files in Spain, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Chile, Argentina, Panama, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay.
The operation began in January when police in the Galician town of Pontevedra received a complaint that pornographic pictures of children, some little more than babies, were being distributed through the internet. They set up a watch and in only 15 days had uncovered more than 900 hits on the site.
When they realised that they had stumbled on a major international network, their searches widened to bring in Eurojust and Ibered - the international police co-ordinating bodies of Europe and Latin America - and they held meetings with police officers from six countries.
This is the second major internet paedophile ring broken by Spanish police in three months. Last December, 27 people were arrested in a series of raids across Spain.
Police seized thousands of files with names of subscribers and pornographic films of small children, some as young as five, which they said had been shot in the US, Sweden and Asia. A detective said some of the scenes were so sickening he could not believe what he was viewing.
Yesterday, Spain's ombudsman Enrique Mugica called for tighter controls on internet connections.
One of his proposals is to force internet providers to keep for at least a year details of website connections to help investigation.
He warned that the international nature of the internet made it simple for those using it for viewing child sex scenes to keep their anonymity. Mr Mugica said: "Unfortunately this amounts to little more than an unpunishable crime."
The Action Against Child Prostitution Association warned recently that in 2003 they had received 10,000 complaints of unpleasant images on the internet and on chat lines, of which 20 per cent contained hard core child pornography.