More than two years after a pair of FBI agents were killed, an investigation into an alleged international pedophile ring in the U.S. and Australian has seen authorities finally make arrests in the case, taking nearly 100 people into custody.
At a Tuesday news conference, the FBI and Australian Federal Police shared that they have now made a total of 98 arrests in connection to child sex abuse and saved 13 children from harm.
Law enforcement agencies shared that the joint operation resulted in 79 arrests, 65 indictments, and 43 convictions in the U.S., while 19 men were arrested in Australia.
The alleged child sex abuse ring has been investigated for some time and saw two FBI agents, Daniel Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger, shot dead at a Sunrise, Florida, apartment complex on Feb. 2, 2021, while they were executing a search warrant for a computer programmer who they suspected of possession of child abuse material. Three other agents were shot and injured while the suspect died.
The deaths of Alfin and Schwartzenberger marked the first time an FBI agent lost their life in the line of duty since 2008.
As for the case today, officials shared that the alleged ring was a “peer-to-peer network,” which had “some offenders committing offenses for over 10 years,” Australian Federal Police Commander Helen Schneider shared during the conference.
“Some of the children were known to the men who were arrested,” Schneider said.
The investigation became a joint operation in 2022 when the Australian police received details from the FBI that there were Australian members of the network and that they were allegedly sharing child abuse material on the dark web.
On Tuesday, the FBI’s legal attaché in Canberra, Nitiana Mann, shared that the investigation was “highly complex.”
“The complexity and anonymity of these platforms means that no agency or country can fight these threats alone,” Mann told reporters Tuesday.
In a statement about the arrest, police said that most of the Australian alleged offenders had jobs that used advanced IT skills. It also says they used “software to anonymously share files, chat on message boards, and access websites within the network.”
“Viewing, distributing, and producing child abuse material is a horrific crime, and the lengths that this network went to to avoid detection is an indication of just how dangerous they were,” AFP Commander Schneider said. “The longer people like this avoid detection, it means the longer the cycle of abuse continues.”
Further arrests have not been ruled out, and the investigation is ongoing.
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