FBI tip-off rescues Kiwi abuse victim

Government investigators trawling through almost 250,000 horrific images of international child sex abuse discovered a young New Zealand victim whose parents had no idea she had been preyed on by a paedophile.

Police say the abuse of the eight-year-old South Canterbury girl would probably never have been discovered and she may have been victimised again were it not for the efforts of the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) censorship compliance unit, which tracked the offender after an FBI tip-off.

A team of three investigators from the unit's Christchurch office spent several months going through the paedophile's hard drive looking for clues to any local victim.

They decided to study each of the images after a raid on the paedophile's home found items of concern, including home-made sex devices and images where he had "morphed" his head onto that of men abusing children and newborn babies. He had downloaded those images from an overseas child sex website. There were concerns that his "engagement" with the images meant he might be a physical sex offender.

The team's efforts paid off when, almost at the end of the collection of images, they found what they had been looking for two pictures of the man doing an indecent act on a young girl as part of a series of otherwise innocuous holiday snaps.

Last week, a 34-year-old freezing worker pleaded guilty in the Timaru District Court to 40 charges of possessing objectionable material, four charges of making objectionable material and two charges of indecently assaulting the girl. He was remanded in custody and given interim name suppression until sentencing next month.

Steve O'Brien, the manager of the censorship compliance unit, said the operation had taken its toll on staff.

"Naturally it's hard on them, we try to keep the viewing of the images to a minimum, but the work demanded in this case meant we had to go through the vast bulk of the material, which is not pleasant."

Denise Ritchie, of the anti-child pornography group Stop Demand, said the case was an example of how having a dedicated team investigating this type of offending had put New Zealand at the forefront of the fight against online child sex abusers. In other countries, it was left to police, she said.

"The DIA compliance team is held up globally as one of the most committed, tenacious and successful teams in the world," she said.

Investigators raided the Timaru man's home in July 2006, after the FBI's San Francisco office detected someone with a New Zealand-registered internet service provider (ISP) downloading images from a message board called "Ranchi".

The DIA made inquiries with the ISP which led them to an unkempt brick home, south of Timaru. The man had a collection of 250,000 images, the majority of them depicting child sex abuse, as well as a cache of unlicensed guns. He was later convicted on firearms charges. The man admitted he was addicted to child pornography and had been accessing it on the internet for 10 years.

Detective Greg Harrison of Timaru police said it was discovered the offender was a friend of the girl's family, and had gone with them on a camping holiday to Central Otago three Christmases ago.

The abuse had occurred openly at a camp site while the offender sat in a chair, but no one had seen it at the time. "He was pretty bold with it, he's a sick unit," Harrison said.

He said the girl's parents were shocked when told what had happened. "He may have kept on going on camping trips, so they're happy from that respect."

Harrison said the girl was not fully aware of what had happened to her so police decided not to put her through the trauma of calling her as a witness.

O'Brien said it was rare to uncover a local victim. "They are few and far between, so when we get one of these we really want to push the message and raise awareness that this type of activity is not just something that happens overseas, it can happen in New Zealand."

RECENT CHILD PORNOGRAPHY CONVICTIONS

June 12, 2008: Christchurch sickness beneficiary Leigh Marshall O'Connor, 53, jailed for 18 months after pleading guilty to 14 charges involving possession and distribution of objectionable publications.

June 10, 2008: Lower Hutt man Dean Cooper, 40, jailed for two years and four months for possessing pictures and movies of children being sexually abused after a German police tip-off.

June 4, 2008: Auto electrician Warren Bradley David Harding of Hamilton, 68, jailed for two years after pleading guilty to 40 charges of knowingly possessing objectionable images.

April 23, 2008: Wanganui man Terrence Paul Cavanagh jailed for 11 months when resentenced on 10 charges of possessing objectionable publications. Cavanagh was sentenced in June 2007 to community work and supervision for the offences but breached the terms of the sentence.

March 20, 2008: Computer technician Stephen John Laing, 25, of Massey, West Auckland, receives the longest prison term ever handed down to an internet pornography trader five years. He was caught with the help of the FBI.

2007: Four New Zealanders charged with possessing child-sex abuse images after an international operation netted 63 people accused of accessing child pornography websites.

2006: 27 people arrested in Operation Tercel, one of the most extensive child pornography stings in New Zealand. The men were buying child pornography from websites based in the former Soviet republic of Belarus.

- © Fairfax NZ News