By PTI
NEW DELHI: The CBI has arrested seven persons in connection with its operation against alleged peddling of online child sexual exploitation material, officials said Wednesday.
Ram Gautam, Satender Mittal and Purushottam were taken into custody from Delhi, Surendra Kumar Nayak from Dhenkanal in Odisha, Nishant Jain from Noida, Jitender Kumar from Jhansi and T Mohan Krishna from Tirupati, they said.
The CBI will produce the accused from Delhi before a competent court on Wednesday while for the rest it will seek a transit remand for bringing them to Delhi for further investigation, they said. More arrests are likely as investigation progresses, they said.
“It was alleged that various syndicates of individuals based in different parts of India and foreign countries were indulging in circulating, storing and viewing Child Sexual Exploitation Material (CSEM) through various social media platforms/groups.
It was also alleged that persons were disseminating CSEM by way of sharing links, videos, pictures, texts, posts and hosting of such content on social media groups/platforms and third party storage/hosting platforms,” CBI spokesperson RC Joshi had said.
The agency had launched a massive operation on Children’s Day on November 14, registering 23 FIRs against 83 accused which continued till next day.
The CBI action was based on inputs of its special unit ‘Online Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation Prevention/ Investigation (OCSAE)’ which tracks and monitors posting, circulation and downloads of child sexual exploitation material on the internet.
The operation targeted over 50 social media groups having more than 5,000 alleged offenders sharing child sexual abuse material with some accused based in countries like Pakistan, Canada, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Sri Lanka, the US, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, the UK, Belgium and Ghana.
