Four men have committed suicide after being caught in an Internet child porn sweep that landed over 2,000 charges with more than 200 arrests, and promised hundreds more arrests to come when the case emerged late last month.
Two of the four men had been charged formally in the child porn cases. Two of the suicides lived in Victoria state, one in Western Australia, and one in Queensland, according to several news reports.
Australian Justice Minister Chris Ellison expressed regret over the suicides while adding they would not deter the ongoing Internet child porn probe. “It’s regrettable that four people, the subject of charges, have taken their own lives,” he said to the Australian news media. “But this investigation is an extremely important one in dealing with criminal activity which deals with the violation of innocent children.”
Seven hundred Australians are now under investigation and as many as 500 could be arrested in due course, Ellison said. Four hundred premises have been raided since the Australian child porn case began in earnest, and arrests are said to have included police officers, teachers, clergy, and at least one child care center owner.
The four suicides were an electrician, a prison guard, a former police officer, and a man whose profession has yet to be disclosed at this writing. The electrician was found dead in his car at his Bunbury, Western Australia home. The prison guard in Victoria was found in his car after his police interview in the case, as was the Victoria man whose profession wasn’t yet disclosed.
The former police officer, in Queensland, said to have faced 46 charges involving child abuse computer games, was found dead the day before he would have appeared in court. He was relieved of duty when it first became known he might be a child porn suspect, in June.
Known as Operation Auxin, the Australian Internet child porn crackdown began when an American probe in February, producing almost 100,000 child porn leads around the world, revealed an epidemic of child porn originating mainly from Belarus in eastern Europe.
Australian law enforcement is still due to examine 400 computers and other materials seized in the first crackdown raids, but some reports indicated police found child porn libraries containing over 250,000 images, some three decades old, as well as some “home studios designed to produce child pornography,” as one news report put it.
