The US attorney general, John Ashcroft, yesterday issued a string of charges arising from one of the largest international child porn investigations in history, linking merchants in the US, Indonesia and Russia to customers around the world.
One hundred people have been arrested as a result of a two-year investigation, US officials said yesterday.
The child pornography network was centred on Texas, where a company calling itself Landslide Productions Inc took credit card payments over the internet for access to pornographic pictures and films from Russia and Indonesia showing children being sexually abused.
"With the help and cooperation of parents we will not only identify and prosecute those who seek to victimise children in cyberspace but we will prevent future children from becoming victims as well," Mr Ashcroft pledged yesterday.
The case was part of a nationwide operation against child pornography, code-named Avalanche, involving the Dallas police and the US Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), which first detected the Landslide ring.
"During an Operation Avalanche search, we found a collection of videotapes produced by a suspect depicting the sexual abuse of several young girls. One of the girls was only four years old," said Kenneth Weaver, the chief postal inspector. He said the suspect had worked as a computer consultant and that pornography was also distributed by post.
According to the USPIS, the Landslide website had an estimated 250,000 visitors, who paid $30 (£21) for a monthly subscription, earning the company profits of up to $1.4m (£1m).
The postal inspectors were able to track down many of Landslide's customers from credit card information and other traces left by their internet transactions. Thomas Reedy, who ran Landslide out of Fort Worth, was sentenced to a total of 1,335 years in prison on Monday, after having been found guilty of sexual exploitation of minors, distribution of child pornography and conspiracy.
His wife, Janice, the ring's accountant, was sentenced to 14 years in jail.
Warrants have been issued for the arrest of three other webmasters who are accused of selling child pornography through the Landslide site: RW Kusuma and Hanny Ingganata of Indonesia and Boris Greenberg of Russia, but all three are still at large.
Indonesia's national police spokesman, Major General Didi Widayadi, said the US authorities first contacted Indonesian detectives at the end of last year in connection with an investigation into child pornography.
"It seems Indonesians opened a website on a server and through an account in America and then put pornographic pictures of children on it," he said.
The Indonesian police have been cooperating closely with their American counterparts but prosecutions are likely to prove difficult because Indonesian laws governing this type of crime "are minimal", Gen Widayadi said.
"This is a new and international type of crime so it's taking more time to process," he said. "Our laws don't really cover situations where the person is based in Indonesia but committing the crime in another country."
Mr Ashcroft said that the justice department's efforts to combat child pornography relied heavily on a "cyber tip line" which encouraged citizens to report suspicious online activity.
