In Germany, police officers discovered what they believe to be a child sex ring built in an allotment house located on the northern side of the country.
Authorities said that a group of men took their young relatives captive inside the property, which is found near the city of Munster. The young children were then abused continuously while the suspects recorded them on film, as reported by the Daily Mail.
Child abuse
Officers expected the sophisticated child pornography ring to have spread images of young victims over the internet. Authorities arrested 11 individuals involved in the crime in suspicion of abusing three boys and selling the footage online.
Close family relatives of the boys aged five, ten, and 12, along with a pair of parents and one uncle, were included with those that police arrested.
Investigators used the videos of the victims to identify them, which they retrieved from encrypted hard drives that they recovered. Experts are continuously working to unlock the hard drives, said authorities.
According to The New York Times, the German government had conducted a decade-long campaign to fight the sexual abuse of young children. However, more than 20,000 reports of child abuse or pornography are still recorded each year.
On Saturday, authorities announced the arrests and said that they were among the latest in a string of high-profile cases.
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The house that the suspects used to house the children and record the illegal activities were fitted with cameras and gadgets. Police officers refused to reveal images of the insides of the building, as reported by Deutsche Welle.
Perpetrators of the crime used sophisticated technology to encrypt the evidence that they sold online on the darknet, only accessible to those with access to specific software. The platform is used by criminals to talk with each other without being detected by authorities.
Brutal mastermind
A 27-year-old information technology technician from Munster is the main suspect of the case and has allegedly encrypted more than 500 terabytes of child pornography, said the head of the investigation Joachim Poll to reporters on Monday.
Poll said that all of the storage devices were professionally encrypted and that they were so well-done that their team has not been able to crack them all yet.
The unidentified suspect had allegedly built a cooled room in his basement that had servers equipped to hold the images that they placed in encrypted hard drives, said authorities.
The officials also believe that the criminals recorded the videos in a cabin that they equipped with surveillance cameras inside and out located on a countryside property.
Authorities found video footage of two of the victims being "brutally" raped by the primary suspect and three other men, said Poll. He added that he had reason to believe the suspects sedated the children.
After the arrests, police placed the children in the care of social workers who will work on giving them psychological assistance and support, said Martin Botzenhardt, a prosecutor in Munster's western city.
Local police expect that they will be making more arrests and apprehensions when they unlock more of the hard drives and find more evidence.