Children rescued from world-wide sex ring

Eight British children have been rescued from sexual predators belonging to a global paedophile ring, it emerged today.

The youngsters, aged between six and 14, were identified from thousands of images seized in an international police operation.

Police safeguarded the victims after they were traced to addresses in the UK, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) Centre said.

News of the victims came to light after a two-year investigation led by the FBI and Queensland Police in Australia concluded last week.

Investigators successfully infiltrated the online newsgroup which also had members in the United States, Australia, Canada and Germany.

A total of 22 people were arrested last week, including two men in the UK, by officers in the final act of dismantling the paedophile ring.

Six further British men have already been jailed for their roles in trading and receiving pictures and videos on the network.

Paul Griffiths, who heads the victim identification team at Ceop, said the children were subjected to horrendous abuse.

He said: "In every image there is a child. These images are crime scene photos where children are being subjected to sexual abuse. This is not 'child pornography'.

"It's important to remember too though that these children were not missing.

"They were located in the place where they were supposed to be safe - their own home - where their abuse was recorded and made available over the internet to satisfy sickening sexual desires of a deviant group of individuals."

As a result of the two-year operation, 400,000 images of child abuse were seized and some were passed to individual countries for investigation.

Officers in the UK used facial recognition software and painstaking detective work to identify victims from clues in each image.

The paedophile ring attempted to protect itself from the police by vetting and approving each member.

In common with other groups, new members must prove their worth by submitting fresh pictures or videos of abuse.

Members used aliases, such as Box of Rocks, Crazy Horse, Lizzard and Pickleman.

But undercover Australian investigators discovered and infiltrated the ring in January 2006.

According to US court documents, one member in Florida labelled one folder of images "mild" and another "wild".

"My thanks to you and all the others that together make this the greatest group of paedos ever to gather in one place," he wrote online.

FBI executive assistant director Stephen Tidwell said the online gang was run like a business with indecent images used as a substitute for cash.

He said: "This is beyond a quantum exponential leap for us to see folks that have gone to this much trouble to produce this kind of volume of horrific exploitation of children."

Ross Barnett, detective chief superintendent with the Queensland Police Service, said sophisticated attempts were made to block police.

He said: "From our perspective, it's definitely the largest and most sophisticated and disciplined group that we have ever seen operating in this environment."