A German minister has said that it would take a single cop 2,000 years to watch the 10,000 child porn videos in the caravan park paedophilia case and he fears officers cannot get the job done.
The comments were made by Herbert Reul, Interior Minister of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Reul said: “I could have never imagined it to be like this.
“We are facing a mountain of data, images and films combined. And we do not manage to get it analysed, that is the truth.”
According to Reul, the evidence in the case is so great that a single police officer “needs 2,000 years” to watch all the material.
Reul said: “I cannot deploy so many police officers and experts. We need technology, otherwise we will not manage to handle it.”
According to local media, the evidence encompasses around 15 terabytes of data, among which are three million child pornography pictures as well as 10,000 videos.
The case centres around the rundown Eichwald caravan park in the town of Luegde where authorities believe around 40 children were raped over 1,000 times in the case and videos of the abuse were then posted on the darknet.
Eight suspects in total have now been identified in total by the police, as well as 40 children who were allegedly abused at the rundown caravan park.
A further 12 children are suspected of being raped as well by the suspects.
According to local media, two of the newly identified suspects are parents.
Karl-Eitel John of the local youth welfare office believed they may have willingly “supplied” their children for main suspect Andreas V.
In total, the youth office has taken five children away from their families and placed them into care.
Main suspect Andreas V., 56, and campsite neighbour Mario S., 33, allegedly raped the minors at their caravan homes.
According to police sources, the victims – both girls and boys – were aged between four and 13 years old.
The amount of times the children were raped is estimated to be well over 1,000.
The abuse was allegedly filmed by the perpetrators and broadcast over the darknet.
According to the public prosecutor’s office, Mario S. is seen abusing children in some of the videos he created with Andreas V.
One of the victims was Andreas V.’s own foster daughter. He also allegedly used her as bait to lure other children to his rundown holiday home.
According to reports, an investigation into the suspected child abuse committed by Andreas V. goes back as far as 2008.
They allegedly sent footage to a third man, aged 48, who was arrested on suspicion of ordering the abuse.
The 48-year-old man from the town of Stade allegedly watched the men rape a young girl on the darknet twice.
The roles of the other suspects in the case have not been reported yet.
Investigation blunders have cast a dark light on the case as the first warnings about the mass child abuse were reportedly passed on to the authorities in 2016.
Father-of-two Jens Ruzsitska reported Andreas V. to both the cops and the youth welfare office after he allegedly saw him grope children at a birthday party in the town of Bad Pyrmont, but no action was taken.
The youth welfare office of Hamelin in Lower Saxony also learned about the alleged sexual abuse when workers at the local job centre called for an investigation into Andreas V.
He reportedly appeared with his foster daughter because he needed money and a worker found it suspicious that the girl said that she could no longer stand the smell of men.
According to local media, in a joint meeting with job centre workers, Andreas V. even confessed that his foster daughter “turned him on” but that she did not want anything to do with his overtures anymore.
Investigations against several police officers and youth welfare office workers are also underway to establish why action was not taken much earlier.
A suitcase reportedly containing 155 CDs and DVDs from Andreas V.’s trailer has also gone missing from the police station in the Lippe district, although it is unclear if the 10,000 videos the minister was talking about are in addition to these discs.
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Story By: Koen Berghuis, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Central European News
