PARIS – Austrian authorities have gathered information on more than 2,360 people from 77 countries who tried to view child pornography through a Russian Web site stored on a Vienna computer, the country's Interior Ministry said Wednesday.
The discovery, which has not yet yielded arrests, set off a pedophilia hunt around the world.
The FBI is looking for as many as 600 suspects in the United States, the Austrian ministry said. Germany has been given about 400 names and France close to 100. The ministry said 23 of the suspects are Austrian.
Interior Minister Guenther Platter said the videos included images that showed “the worst kind of child sexual abuse” of children of various ages, ranging up to 14.
“Girls could be seen being raped, and you could also hear screams,” Harald Gremel, an Austrian police expert on Internet crime who headed the investigation, said at a news conference in Vienna, according to The Associated Press.
Less than a month ago, Bernadette Chirac, the wife of the French president, held a meeting in Paris of other leaders' wives, including Laura Bush, to urge international cooperation to fight child pornography and sexual solicitation of children online.
Gremel said the investigation began in July when a man working for a Vienna-based Internet business spotted child pornography on one of the company's computers during a routine check. He blocked access to the videos and recorded the Internet Protocol addresses – coded numbers that identify computers – of people who continued to try to download the material.
Within 24 hours, Gremel said, the man recorded more than 8,000 attempts from 2,361 computers in 77 countries. He turned the information over to police.
Gremel said the Austrian police seized 31 desktop computers, seven laptop computers, 1,232 DVDs and CDs, 1,428 diskettes and 213 videocassettes in subsequent raids on the 23 Austrian suspects, who range in age from 17 to 69.
The offending Web site has since been shut down and Austria is cooperating with Russian authorities to find its operators, Gremel said.
An aggressive effort by Britain's Internet Watch Foundation to shut or block access to child pornography sites resulted in a major decline in the percentage of child pornography sites based in Britain, to 0.2 percent last year from 18 percent in 1997, according to a recent congressional report. A similar initiative began in the United States last year.
But laws on child pornography vary widely. A report issued last year by the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children found that 95 countries had no legislation at all that specifically addressed child porn. Operators of child pornography Web sites can use computer servers in different countries around the world and set up new sites at little cost when their sites on a server are shut down.
The FBI announced last year that it had assembled an international task force, with officials from Europol, the European Union's law enforcement organization, and 18 countries serving six-month stints in the United States to aid U.S. child-pornography investigators.
