A man obsessed with images of children being sexually abused was jailed indefinitely in Britain yesterday as part of a massive international online investigation that began with a tip from Canadian police and resulted in the removal of at least 31 children from abusive situations.
Timothy David Martyn Cox, 27, went by the online alias "Son_of_god" and ran an online chat room and file-sharing site called "Kids the Light of Our Lives" that let users exchange indecent images and videos of children. He pleaded guilty to nine offences relating to the possession and distribution of the material.
"You could view a child being raped in real time," Jim Gamble, the head of Britain's Child Exploitation and Online Protection agency, said, adding that the files ranged from infants to teenagers.
More than 75,000 indecent and explicit images of children being sexually abused were found on Mr. Cox's computer, while evidence showed that he had supplied more than 11,000 images to other users through the chat room.
At the moment of his arrest, 70 online pedophiles were waiting to download images of children being abused.
The investigation led to the identification of more than 700 suspects in 35 countries - 200 of them in Britain. Twenty-four people were arrested in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec.
Seven of the children rescued from abuse were in Canada, but police would not disclose details of the children's relationships with those arrested.
"These are shocking images which involve very young children - in the worst cases being subjected to sadistic, painful abuse which you, for some distorted reason, appear to take enjoyment from," Mr. Justice Peter Thompson told Mr. Cox during yesterday's sentencing.
He described Mr. Cox, who operated the file-sharing site from his bedroom in the large farmhouse in Suffolk, England, where he lived with his parents and sister, as "obsessed with images of children being sexually abused."
The trail that lead police to Mr. Cox began more than two years ago in Canada, when the Internet child exploitation unit of the Edmonton police received a tip from a woman saying she'd overheard two children talking about sexual abuse.
From that an Edmonton man was arrested and eventually sentenced to 14 years in jail for abusing his stepchildren and distributing pictures of the abuse on the Internet.
Dubbed Project Wickerman, the investigation continued as the Edmonton man told police he'd been in contact with other pedophiles through the online chat room called Kiddypics & Kiddyvids, where images of child abuse could be shared.
Edmonton investigators quickly hooked up with Toronto's sex crimes unit, known for its aggressive approach to tracking online child abusers, and undercover officers began frequenting the chat room and nabbed the site's primary host, who used the online alias "G.O.D."
A few weeks later police noticed a similar chat site had surfaced, this time calling itself Kids the Light of Our Lives.
Some chat-room visitors included people of interest in the Wickerman investigation, specifically one known as "Son_of_god."
Canadian police narrowed down the location to Britain in August of 2006 and alerted their counterparts there.
When Mr. Cox was arrested at his computer in September, 2006, police posted a message to the chat room saying he had gone for tea and would be back shortly. Officers from Britain and Toronto quickly assumed his online identity and spent 10 days collecting evidence about other users before shutting down the site.
The site was revived not long after, but police quickly infiltrated it again, arresting new administrator Gordon Mackintosh, 33, also from Britain, and using his aliases "silentbackheart" and "lust4skoolgurls" to gather more evidence.
He pleaded guilty to 27 charges of making, possessing and distributing the material and is due to be sentenced next week.
"It was something great to be a part of at the time because we knew we were breaking ground," said Toronto Police Sergeant Paul Krawczyk, who worked on the case until February.
Judge Thompson said Mr. Cox poses "significant risks" and has to be imprisoned indefinitely "for public protection."
In order for Mr. Cox to ever be released he must satisfy the authorities that he does not pose any threat to the community.
Brett Popplewell is a freelance reporter based in London