The Central Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday arrested seven accused in connection with 23 cases of online sexual abuse of minors and circulation of child pornographic material. The arrests come a day after the agency conducted searches across 14 States and Union Territories. More arrests are likely.
The accused are: Raman Gautam, Sathyender Mittal and Purushottam Jha from Delhi; Surendra Kumar Naik, a resident of Dhenkanal in Odisha; Nishant Jain and Jitendra Kumar from Noida and Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh; and T. Mohan Krishna, a resident of Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh. The CBI has alleged that Mr. Krishna used to upload child sexual exploitation material (CSEM) on various online platforms for sale.
“During the investigation, it was revealed that the accused were sharing the links of CSEM videos on certain websites e.g. https://koflink.com, https://pdisklink.com etc ... some individuals were involved in trading of CSEM material,” said a CBI official.
The 23 cases have been registered against 83 persons allegedly part of various syndicates which were involved in sharing links, videos, pictures, texts, posts and hosting of CSEM on social media groups and third party storage/hosting platforms.
Investigations revealed that several accused were being paid for sharing the videos and images on per-view basis. The agency is following the money trail to establish the identities of other suspects.
According to the CBI, it has so far gathered information about more than 50 groups comprising over 5,000 offenders. “It is initially learnt that there may be involvement of nationals of about 100 countries spread across various continents. We are coordinating with sister agencies through formal and informal channels,” the CBI said.
The accused are from Pakistan (36), Canada (35), the United States (35), Bangladesh (31), Sri Lanka (30), Nigeria (28), Azerbaijan (27), Yemen (24) and Malaysia (22). The agency plans to coordinate with various foreign law enforcement agencies for further action in this regard.
“An estimated 2.4 million instances of online child sexual abuse were reported from India from 2017 to 2020, according to the Interpol, and 80% of the children were girls under the age of 14. The content and consumers of child pornography are growing at a sharp rate. One of the findings shows that search engines get over 1.16 lakh queries every day related to child pornography,” said the official.
Given the serious nature of the offence, the CBI is exploring the possibility of taking up the matter with social media websites and hosting platforms to examine their role and liability. It also plans to approach the International Child Sexual Exploitation Database to trace the origin of the child sexual abuse images seized during the operations.
