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June 13, 2012

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Ukraine says suspect in porn case is innocent

UKRAINANIAN authorities yesterday cast doubt on child-pornography charges brought by US prosecutors against a Ukrainian national, saying local investigators have found no evidence of a crime.

Maksym Shynkarenko, 33, from the eastern city of Kharkiv, was charged in New Jersey on Monday with founding and operating a Ukraine-based child-pornography website that had customers around the world and has resulted in 560 convictions throughout the United States alone.

A 32-count indictment against Shynkarenko says he traded in tens of thousands of hardcore pornographic images and videos that depicted children, including infants, toddlers and teenagers, being graphically sexually assaulted or abused.

Paul Fishman, the US attorney for New Jersey, said that in some cases the videos were submitted by customers - later prosecuted - who had filmed themselves molesting children.

Shynkarenko was extradited to the US from Thailand over the weekend, where he had been in custody since his 2009 arrest while he was on vacation. The case is being brought in New Jersey because US investigators first discovered Shynkarenko's website while investigating another individual in the state.

Fishman said Shynkarenko allegedly made hundreds of thousands of dollars "effectively selling tickets to view the exploitation of children" from 2003 until 2008 by operating a network of websites.

But Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleksandr Dikusarov said local investigators had found no merit to the charges against Shynkarenko.

"Our law enforcement bodies have investigated this and did not find anything," Dikusarov said. "We will be defending the rights of our citizen."

Shynkarenko's mother says her son was mistaken for another man with the same name.

 

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