Babies Raped, Europol Arrests, Homophiles, Paedophiles, Hetrophiles
Europol director Rob Wainwright: said offenders were developing better file sharing techniques and ways to protect their identity. Photograph: Jerry Lampen/ReutersRelated
Degree of foresight as police forces learn to tackle cybercrime | 09/09/2011Concern over child sexualisation | 19/09/2011Massive paedophile ring broken, say police | 17/03/2011Police across Europe have arrested more than 100 people for sharing the "worst-of-the-worst" child sexual abuse images across the Internet, Europol said today.
In house-to-house searches across 26 countries, "Operation Icarus" swooped on previously unknown networks of child sex offenders who were sharing videos online, the European law enforcement agency said.
"The operation targeted those sharing the most extreme forms of video material, which included babies and toddlers being sexually abused and raped," Europol said in a statement.
So much material was seized it will take months or even years to analyse.
The year-long investigation, led by Danish police, will now focus on identifying the people who produced the videos, as well as their child victims.
Europol director Rob Wainwright said the operation showed that the internet was helping offenders develop better file sharing techniques and ways to protect their identity.
One Swiss man arrested had 36,000 hours of video on his computer equipment, a Europol spokesman said.
EU home affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said the case showed the importance of Europol and national forces working together on appalling crimes that knew no borders.
"These children are victims of multiple crimes. First, when the actual abuse takes place. Then, when it is filmed. And, thereafter, every time the images are posted, circulated or viewed," she said in a statement.
Europol said it had identified 269 suspects and expected to make further arrests on top of the 112 people already detained.
Cloyne Report Chapter Published
Chapter nine of the Cloyne report, which was cleared for publication in the High Court this morning, will not be published until Monday to allow counselling services prepare to assist callers who may be upset by its findings.
Earlier today, the Department of Justice had indicated that it would be published this afternoon but a spokesman has now said it is being delayed as the Minister Alan Shatter was anxious that counselling services be in place first.
Much of the chapter is already in the public domain, but parts of it were redacted by High Court President Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns when the Cloyne report was published on July 13th last.
He did so as court proceedings were then pending against ‘Fr Ronat’, the priest against whom complaints are dealt with in the chapter. It was feared that full publication of the chapter might be deemed prejudicial to the outcome of those proceedings, which are now completed.
Mr Justice Kearns cleared the redacted parts of the chapter for publication at a brief hearing in the High Court this morning.
At 42 pages, the chapter is the longest in the Cloyne report.
The Murphy Commission concluded that the way complaints against Fr Ronat were dealt with there “clearly illustrates the failure of the diocese of Cloyne to deal properly with allegations of child sexual abuse up to the year 2008”.
Failures in the handling of complaints against Fr Ronat rested “mainly on Bishop Magee and Monsignor O’Callaghan, the report said. "However, at least three priests of the diocese appear to have ignored complaints. Bishop Magee mainly left the handling of complaints to Monsignor O’Callaghan and did not exercise his authority over Fr Ronat in any effective way,” it added.
Dr Magee resigned as Bishop of Cloyne in March 2010, while Msgr O’Callaghan had been vicar general in the diocese and its delegate on child protection matters.
According to chapter nine, complaints made to the diocese about Fr Ronat were not reported to the Garda when they should have been. They were not reported to the health board or HSE by the diocese until 2008.
The report found there were no proper Church investigations of the complaints. A canonical process ordered where Fr Ronat was concerned in 1995 “was effectively stalled for 14 years and does not seem to have been completed”.
The commission “does not accept that there was any real restriction on his (Fr Ronat’s) ministry”, it said.
It said when the priest was finally removed from ministry, he continued to wear clerical dress. "This meant that, again, there was no public knowledge of his real situation," it asdded.
According to chapter nine, there was “no evidence" that the HSE made any inquiries about Fr Ronat when notified by gardaí of a complaint against him in March 2005.
It also found that a statement to gardaí by one complainant “seems to have been put in a drawer and forgotten about until raised by this investigation” and that complainants were “deeply unhappy” with the DPP’s handling of allegations against Fr Ronat.
Dutch Catholic Church Child Rapists Homophiles
The report by an independent commission said Catholic officials failed to tackle the widespread abuse "to prevent scandals". The suspected number of abuse victims who spent some of their youth in church institutions is between likely lies 10,000 and 20,000, according to a summary of the report.
Based on a survey of more than 34,000 people, the commission estimated that one in 10 Dutch children suffered some form of abuse. The number doubled to 20 percent of children who spent part of their youth in an institution - whether Catholic or not.
The commission said it received some 1,800 complaints of abuse at Catholic schools, seminaries and orphanages and that the institutions suffered from "a failure of oversight". It then conducted the broader survey of the general population for a more comprehensive analysis of the scale and nature of sexual abuse of minors.
The commission was set up last year under the leadership of former government minister Wim Deetman to investigate allegations of abuse dating from 1945.
Deetman said that the problem of abuse continued in part because the Catholic church organization in the Netherlands was splintered, so bishops and religious orders sometimes worked autonomously to deal with abuse and "did not hang out their dirty laundry."
However, he said that the commission concluded that "it is wrong to talk of a culture of silence" by the church as a whole.
The Dutch Bishops Conference scheduled a press conference for Friday afternoon to respond to the report.
The investigation followed allegations of repeated incidents of abuse at one cloister that quickly spread to claims from Catholic institutions across the country, echoing similar scandals around the world.
The commission identified about 800 priests, brothers, pastors or lay people working for the church who had been named in the complaints. About 105 of them were still alive, although it was not known if they remained in church positions, the report said. It identified them as "perpetrators" rather than "offenders," meaning they had not been proven to have committed a crime.
The Dutch branch of the Catholic church agreed last month to launch a compensation system that clears the way for victims of abuse by priests and other church workers to receive payments.
The new compensation system has a scale starting at £4,100 and rising to a maximum of £84,000 depending on the nature of the abuse.
According to the Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics, 29 percent of the Dutch population of 16 million identified themselves as Catholics in 2008, making it the largest religion in the country.
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