Childporn on Whatsapp: German probe leads CBI to Chennai, huge porn haul in houses of 2 accused
CBI registered a case against seven people across the country for allegedly being part of international WhatsApp groups in which child sexual abuse material was being circulated, a team of sleuths on Tuesday conducted searches in houses belonging to two suspects residing in Chennai.
By : migrator
Update: 2019-10-15 21:52 GMT
Chennai
A day after the CBI, New Delhi, registered a case against seven people across the country for allegedly being part of international WhatsApp groups in which child sexual abuse material was being circulated, a team of sleuths on Tuesday conducted searches in houses belonging to two suspects residing in Chennai.
The CBI teams carried out searches at the houses of Vinoth Kannan of Padmavathi Nagar, Selaiyur, Chennai and Khozema H of Ebrahim Saheb Street, Mannadi on Tuesday after registering the case. They also claimed to have recovered a lot of porn material from one of the accused.
Sources said that both Vinod Kannan and Khozema had submitted their identity documents, driving licences and Aadhaar cards respectively to get their mobile phone connections.
Other suspects are residents of Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Rajasthan. Searches were carried out in the premises belonging to all suspects across the country. During the searches, the agency has recovered 11 mobile phones, two hard discs, 11 SIM cards, 2 memory cards and two pen drives which will be sent to electronic forensic evaluation, they said.
The case was registered after a preliminary inquiry on the basis of a diplomatic communication received from the Embassy of Germany on January 31.
Germany had given out information about Sasche Treppke, who was sentenced to five years in prison there for his alleged involvement in sexual abuse of children and distributing child pornography.
It emerged during the investigation that he was part of 29 WhatsApp groups where child porn was being shared between November 24, 2015 and July 8, 2016. These groups had seven Indian mobile numbers too, officials added.
The embassy communication also said that investigation was conducted in police district of Lubeck in Germany and during the probe police found several data carriers containing pictures of and videos related to child pornography.
There were a total of 483 members in different WhatsApp group and 7 were using Indian numbers. The CBI later tracked down all the Indian mobile numbers and its users before registering a case on September 27 this year.
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