Police in Germany have busted what they say is a major child sex ring being run out of an allotment house in the north of the country.
Officers say a gang of men took their young relatives to the property, near the city of Munster, where they were abused for hours on end while being filmed.
Police have uncovered at least three victims – aged five, 10 and 12 – amid thousands of hours of footage but say they are sure that more will be identified in time.
Eleven people have been arrested so far – including an IT specialist named only as Adrian V, 27, along with his mother, 45-year-old Carina V.
Police in Germany say they have uncovered a major child sex ring being run out of this property – which is located on an allotment near the city of Munster
Police say Adrian, who has two former convictions for child pornography, ran the sex ring out of the allotment house, which was owned by mother Carina.
They say Carina – a kindergarten teacher – had allowed Adrian to use the property, knowing that he intended to abuse children there.
There is no suggestion that she allowed children where she worked to be abused.
Officers allege that the property was equipped inside and out with security cameras so the abuse could be recorded.
Main suspect is Adrian V, 27, who is accused of abusing a ten-year-old relative at the house and filming the abuse to share online
Also included in the house was a double bed and a double bunk bed, German newspaper Bild reported, both of which were watched by cameras.
Police allege that Adrian used the property to abuse a ten-year-old relative, then uploaded footage of the abuse to the Darkweb to establish a ring of sex abusers spanning five states, some of whom would travel to the property to carry out abuse themselves.
The other alleged victims include the five-year-old biological son of one of the suspects and the 12-year-old nephew of a second suspect.
Police said they have established at least 15 incidents of abused spanning from November 2018 until May 2020, but this is only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
Detailing one alleged incident on the weekend of Adrian’s birthday between April 25 and 26, officers say four men gathered in the property to abuse two of the boys – the five-year-old and the ten-year-old – in an ordeal that lasted ‘hours’.
Detective Chief Inspector Joachim Poll said the word ‘abuse’ does not cover the events that unfolded, which he said were more like ‘torture’, according to Frankfurter Allgemeine.
Police say they were led to the ring after they began watching Adrian in 2018, who had child pornography convictions from 2016 and 2017 – both of which saw him given probation.
After tracing an IP address sharing abusive content to a farmhouse he owned, officers searched one of his properties in early 2019 and uncovered a laptop.
However, the device was encrypted ‘in a highly professional manner’, and took investigators until May this year to crack.
Officers say they uncovered videos of him abusing his relative, which led them to arrest him and raid another of his properties – where they uncovered a server room built into a cellar.
Police believe servers in the air-conditioned room have space for 500 terabytes of data, or 250,000 hours of HD video, which officers must now trawl through.
‘Even the most experienced officers have reached the limits of what is humanly tolerable and far beyond,’ Munster police chief Rainer Furth said.
Police say Adrian used this server room to store videos of his abuse – which could amount to 250,000 hours of footage – and shared it with others via the Darkweb
Investigators have only managed to examine a small amount of the content – which he described as ‘hideous filth’ – which led to the arrests of the other suspects.
Alongside Adrian and Carina, only one other suspect has been identified – 42-year-old Enrico L, who also lived near Munster.
He is reported to be the head of the allotment agency where Carina’s property was located, and also owned an allotment of his own nearby.
On Enrico’s plot he had recently built ‘a concrete house with an iron door’, according to Berliner Zeitung.
Also under arrest are a 30-year-old man from Staufenburg, who is reported to be the father of the five-year-old boy.
Another suspect, aged 43 and from Kassel, is reported to be the uncle of the 12-year-old boy.
Two more men – one aged 35, from Hanover, and another aged 41, from Cologne – are also in custody.
Three others were initially arrested but are not currently being detained.
Police have so far arrested 11 people, including Adrian’s mother Carina who is accused of giving him the allotment house knowing what it would be used for
Police suspect that the content the group allegedly generated may have been shared between an international network via the Darkweb.
It is not the first time in recent years that police in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most-populous state, have uncovered a major child abuse ring.
In January 2019 officers uncovered a site at a campground near the district of Lippe where they believe 23 children were abused more than 1,000 times over the course of 10 years.
Andreas V, 56, was accused of abusing the children alongside another man, filming the abuse, and putting it on the Darkweb.
Another man, who was not named at the time, was arrested and accused of buying the footage.