New Delhi: In the biggest crackdown on the circulation and download of child pornography in India, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Saturday conducted raids at 56 locations across 19 states and a Union territory as part of ‘Operation Meghchakra’.
The name of the operation comes from the agency cracking down on ‘cloud servers’ (‘megh‘ means cloud).
According to CBI sources, the National Central Bureau (NCB) of New Zealand, passed on information about circulation and downloads of child sexual abuse material in India to the Interpol’s Crime Against Children Unit headquartered in Singapore. The said unit then passed the information on to CBI in India for action.
The CBI has a specialised Online Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation unit that works closely with the Interpol to identify individuals and networks involved in the circulation, selling and download of child abuse material.
“This operation is aimed at identifying the individuals and even gangs circulating and selling child sexual abuse material over the internet. Most of these people have been doing it on social media and have also been involved in blackmailing minors. While some of these videos are shot secretly, others are in which children are forced in the act,” a source said.
“After we received the inputs from Singapore, we started to act on the specifics and conducted raids to disrupt distribution and download of child sexual abuse material by the individuals who were traced. These rackets operate both at individual and organised levels and the main aim is to disrupt that network by identifying all links,” the source said.
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A worldwide effort
The operation, said sources, is a follow-up of raids conducted by the CBI last year in November as part of a similar operation, called Operation Carbon, which targeted the cloud storage facilities used by peddlers to circulate child pornographic material.
The CBI in 2022 had joined Interpol’s International Child Sexual Exploitation database, which is accessible to select countries, which helps members to identify abusers, victims and crime scenes from audiovisual clips being circulated on the internet using specialised software.
According to reports, India is the 68th country among the total 295 members of the Interpol to have access to this database and software.
Moreover, investigators of member countries can also exchange information and notes with their colleagues across the world, like in this case, where the information generated from New Zealand made its way to India via Singapore.
Last year in November, the CBI arrested three people from Delhi for their alleged role in online child sexual abuse and exploitation and detained a dozen others. The agency had found that over 5,000 people from 100 countries including, Pakistan, Canada, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the US and Azerbaijan, were involved in child sexual abuse through online platforms.
A junior engineer in the Irrigation Department was also arrested from Chitrakoot in Uttar Pradesh for allegedly filming minors and selling their videos over the dark web. According to the CBI, he had later gifted mobile phones and also given cash to the minors to stop them from complaining against him. He, the CBI had said, targeted over 50 minors between the ages of 5 and 16 years.
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)
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