An American child, who was a victim of an on-line pornography ring, has been rescued with help from police in Saskatchewan. The Saskatchewan Internet Child Exploitation unit, or Sask ICE, was part of a two month investigation that lead to the arrest of a man from Marshall, Saskatchewan.
Along with the Alberta ICE team, the Sask ICE unit conducted an investigation in November involving a person distributing child pornography images via the internet. After a search warrant was executed on the suspect in from Marshall, Saskatchewan, he was arrested and his computers seized. But after searching through the seized equipment, the Sask ICE team saw that the crime ring was even bigger than they realized.
"We seized several computers, and as we were going through our evidence we saw several abuse images involving a young girl," said Sergeant Darren Parisian of the Sask ICE unit. "From there we analysed the images and determined the abuse occurred very recently, and it appeared the abuse was perpetrated on the young girl by the person who sent the images to our suspect."
From there, the unit started an investigation determined that both the suspect and victim lived in the United States, so they reached out to US authorities, who arrested the suspect and rescused the young girl.
The suspect was also part of a larger network of people located all across Canada and abroad, who shared and distributed child pornography images with each other. The Sask ICE unit is continuing to investigate this network.
The man has now been charged with 57 child pornography offenses, including distribution and production of images. Parisien says that because the investigation is ongoing, there may be more charges to come.
