Operation Centurian - Child Porn Web Broken

Charged … Alan Lilburne Melchert,
a coach of junior soccer and hockey teams.

DOZENS of men have been arrested for child pornography and abuse offences - including community leaders, a police officer, a teacher and a youth worker - after the nation's biggest anti-pedophile investigation.

The six-month joint operation by the Australian Federal Police and state police forces uncovered several cases of child molestation and highlighted the astonishing way in which pedophiles form secret communities in cyberspace and use the global reach of the internet to trade child exploitation images.

To date, 70 arrests have been made across Australia. A further 20 people have been issued with summonses to appear in court where they will be charged with possessing child exploitation material. More arrests are expected in coming weeks and months.

Dubbed Operation Centurion, the investigation was triggered after a hacker infiltrated a respectable European website and inserted 99 degrading and explicit images of young girls from eastern Europe, the US and Paraguay.

The site - which cannot be named for legal reasons - was besieged by an incredible 12 million hits in just 76 hours after word got around online pedophile networks that the images were available and the website's address was circulated.

Almost 150,000 different computer users from 170 countries accessed the otherwise obscure website, including Australians using 2883 computer IP addresses. Of those, 1513 had downloaded one or more images in the 76-hour period.

Police were able to match IP addresses to locations. Some were public computers in places such as libraries, some were duplicates, but many could be traced to homes.

Those arrested have ranged in age from 19 to 81 and included individuals with a known history of child abuse, and others with unblemished backgrounds.