Child abuse

We wonder if Sadat Amin, the man arrested in Sargodha for planning to travel to Norway with some 25 children as part of a child porn video racket, is alone in this most horrific of trades. Amin admitted a few days ago he had drawn in some 25 children aged between 8 and 14 on the pretext of offering them ‘computer education’ and planned to take them overseas to engage in pornographic acts on film. The arrest came through a tip off from the Norwegian embassy, which obtained the information about Amin after an individual arrested in Norway identified Amin as one of his contacts used in his child pornography trade. James Lindstrom, who had been in contract with Amin over WhatsApp, Skype, and Facebook, was engaged in arranging travel documents for the children and Amin. Amin had already sold pornographic images to Lindstrom in Norway.

Around 65,000 video clips have been recovered from Amin’s possession and he has confessed he had been selling child pornographic content online for several years and that Lindstrom was his contact for this. The FIA has not yet succeeded in tracking down any of the children or their parents. The sordid affair however illustrates how easy it is for criminals based across the world to link up with each other over cyberspace while relatively low sums of money by Western standards can obviously lure in underprivileged children in Pakistan and other developing countries. Amin appears to have cashed in on this. It is quite possible other similar acts of crime are taking place in a similar fashion. We need better monitoring in order to detect such practices. The FIA’s cybercrimes wing was set up precisely for this purpose. We do not really know how effective it has been. Amin’s activities were detected only because of the information passed on by the Norwegian embassy. It is fortunate that this occurred. Further investigation is needed to track down other rackets based either overseas with links in Pakistan or limited to our own country. Most importantly, victims of such crimes need to be better protected. Raising awareness about the dangers of ‘job offers’ over the internet, especially to children, is also one way to prevent them from falling into similar traps.