Australia isn't the only south Pacific nation cracking down on child porn these days—it's neighboring island nation New Zealand has arrested 41 men, including four teachers, in a series of raids. The arrests were sparked five months after U.S. authorities provided New Zealand law enforcement with information about the suspects' access to international child porn websites.
The raids went the length of the split-island nation, including 19 arrests in Auckland, right in Wellington, seven in Canterbury, four each in Bay of Plenty and Otago, three in Hawke's Bay, two in Waikato, and one in Southland. At least nine suspects were reported to have had prior convictions for sexual-related crimes or on the police radar for sex offenses.
New Zealand authorities said the sweep was a follow-up to the American sting known as Operation Falcon, which landed detailed information on 95,000 credit cards last year that were used to buy child porn from a Belarussian website. American law enforcement traced those cards to user home countries and sent details to those countries' authorities.
The sweep came at a critical juncture for New Zealand, which had been smarting under implications that, because there had been no child porn arrests made there yet, the country was perceived as a haven for child porn and pedophilia, compared to hundreds arrested in Australia last year.
But New Zealand detective inspector Bernie Hollewant told reporters the delay was due to authorities needing to verify the information the Americans provided as well as planning and executing the sweep.
The two-day sweep was known as Operation Tercel and involved 101 officers from police, the Department of Internal Affairs, and New Zealand Customs. The sweep involved searching a reported 48 properties and seizing over a hundred computers and thousands of compact discs, DVD discs, and floppy disks.
