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Child porn raid targets school in Philippines
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Government agents raided an Internet child porn operation based in a Philippine school and arrested its president and eight other people, investigators said yesterday.
The suspects used a room at the Mountaintop Christian Academy to post online images and video of children and adults for foreign consumption, said Ronald Aguto, cybercrime investigation head in the National Bureau of Investigation.
Authorities were still investigating, but Aguto said it didn’t appear that children at the school were being abused and that the operators were uploading pre-recorded images and video.
The school had 2,000 elementary and high school students, Aguto added. Its license was revoked in 2006 for unknown reasons but it had remained open.
Puring Martinez, the arrested president and owner of the private school, told GMA television network she rented out the room to the Internet site operators to augment the income of the school as fees paid by students were not enough to cover costs.
She said she was aware that Internet links sold could only be opened by a foreigner using a card and that links led to “naughty” materials.
Martinez’ son, Tom, said the school had only 260 pupils, and insisted that their permit to operate was valid.
He said the Internet operation was owned by an American from Tennessee, who rented two rooms for 40,000 pesos (US$900) in a bungalow separate from the classrooms but within the school compound. All of the suspects arrested are Filipino, with the American’s whereabouts were not clear.
The raid shows the extent of the task facing Philippine authorities in cracking down on child pornographers, who exploit weak law enforcement and increasing broadband Internet penetration to base operations in the country.
Gilbert Sosa, director of the national police’s Anti-Cybercrime Group said last month the Philippines was one of the top 10 sources of child pornography in the world, and that police have been cooperating with other countries to crack down.
Two other Internet porn operations in Quezon city were raided Monday night. At least 22 people were arrested and more than two dozen computers seized.
More than 40 computers were seized as evidence during the raid late Monday at the school in Metropolitan Manila’s Muntinlupa city.
“It was like a computer lab inside the school,” Aguto said. “Even during daytime, when the pupils were there, they were using it for this kind of offense.”
He said site operators worked day and night, chatting online with clients and pretending to be women or girls, depending on what the client wanted. They would upload pictures and pre-recorded video of a nude girl or woman they claimed to be.
Last month, Britain’s National Crime Agency said child abuse investigators in Britain, the US and Australia had dismantled an organized crime group that streamed footage of child sexual abuse. The ring abused impoverished children as young as 6, the agency said.
Authorities made 29 arrests, including 11 people in the Philippines.
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