Child porn cases set to overwhelm German police

During the first half of 2021, reports of child pornography in Germany almost reached the country’s caseload from last year – as federal police authorities warn that its forces are being stretched to their “limits.”

The head of Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) told Bild am Sonntag newspaper that there were as many cases with child sexual abuse imagery reported between January to July this year as recorded across all of 2020.

“The number of reports that we receive about such crimes is up, and the number of investigations is increasing,” BKA President Holger Münch told the paper, adding that the “significant increase...will increasingly bring the police to their resource limits.”

Although Münch did not specify the exact figures for 2021, local media revealed that the BKA had registered some 18,761 cases last year. This apparently marked a nearly 53% increase from 2019.

He also noted that the BKA would likely be needed to “provide more intensive support” to police across Germany’s 16 states in order to combat the growing incidence of child sexual abuse images.

Münch’s comments came as reports emerged about a Catholic priest from the northwestern city of Osnabrück being investigated over alleged child sex abuse images crimes. A diocese spokesperson told local media that the priest had been relieved of his duties with immediate effect.

Following a months-long Europol-led probe, German police in May shut down what they described as “one of the world’s biggest child pornography darknet platforms” and arrested three suspects thought to be its administrators. The site, called ‘Boystown’, had been active since June 2019 and apparently had some 400,000 users at the time it was taken offline.

Then, in July, Bavarian police identified more than 1,600 potential child sex abuse suspects from the US, Austria, Switzerland and France who participated in online chat groups on which child pornography and zoophilia material was shared. Many of the suspects were reportedly minors.

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