Spanish police break up paedophile ring

Police in Spain have broken up a pedophile ring suspected of abusing children as young as 11 months old and distributing images of the abuse on the internet, officials said today.

Five men, two of them computer specialists, were arrested for abducting, raping and abusing children and filming indecent acts, a police spokesman said.

The suspects were detained in Madrid, Murcia, Lerida and Valencia.

One of the suspects had worked as a babysitter to get close to children, the official said.

The abuse seen in the video and photos was allegedly committed by one man, the official added.

The other suspects are accused of either filming the abuse or distributing the footage over the internet, the spokesman said.

Some of the videos and images of the sexual abuse were allegedly distributed online by a closed system known as Internet Relay Chat – IRC – which requires participants to log in using passwords, the official said.

All the babies and children allegedly abused were male, he said.

Pedo Nunez Morgades, children’s rights ombudsman for the Madrid regional government, said the images showed a “worrying trend” in modern communications networks.