Sheffield connection exposed in global paedophile ring

Ian Frost, 35, and his partner Paul Rowlands, 34, Frost’s brother Paul, 37, and 32-year-old Ian Sambridge pleaded guilty at Nottingham Crown Court today to various charges of making, distributing and possessing indecent images of children.

The force said smashing the ring had resulted in 132 children in the UK being protected and safeguarded, and a number of paedophiles being taken out of positions of trust, including teachers, doctors, youth workers and police officers.

The group had been involved in the running of illegal uncensored news groups on the internet in order to circulate the images and movies to 46 countries across the globe, Lincolnshire Police said.

At a briefing ahead of today’s court hearing, Detective Superintendent Paul Gibson, of Lincolnshire Police, said officers first received intelligence from German Federal Police in November 2005 that Ian Frost was running a news service that had an association with indecent images of children.

Lincolnshire Police led the investigation, codenamed Operation Alpine, after receiving the intelligence via the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP).

Officers executed a search warrant at Frost’s home in 2006 in the small picturesque hamlet of Martin Dales in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, which he shared with Rowlands.

Police found a piece of equipment Det Supt Gibson called a “raid array” - a redundant array of independent disks - which is made up of a number of hard drives wired together.

This was so large, he said, that when investigating officers plugged it in the lights in the room dimmed, giving them an idea of the amount of power it needed to operate.

It also had a memory capacity of 4.5 terabytes, equivalent to 3.2 million floppy disks.

Officers found the raid array had been operating an uncensored news service in Manhattan, New York, in 2005 before moving to the location in Lincolnshire.

Det Supt Gibson said illegal news services, which are legal if censored, were “unique” because they operate like a virtual noticeboard containing folders of particular interest that can be shared around the world because linked news servers talk to one another and share information.

IT workers Ian Frost and Rowlands, he said, were running a news service called Athenanews which allowed users to pay a fee depending on the amount of download they required, upon which they were issued with a username and password, and could then search for desired content.

In screengrabs from Athenanews, officers showed how folders labelled “teens”, “baby”, “boys”, could be accessed and downloaded.

The extent of the images and films uncovered by officers ranged from the lowest level of indecent images of children to the most extreme, Det Supt Gibson said.

Officers also found other news services were being run by Paul Frost, also an IT worker, from Woodhouse in Sheffield, South Yorkshire.

Sambridge, a legal adviser, was running another news service from a location in St Albans, Hertfordshire.

The criminality spanned around seven years and netted the group around £2 million, even though they did not appear to have extravagant lifestyles.

Officers found that 1,310 individual packages had been sent to 46 countries around the world by the news servers.

Of those receiving the illegal content involving indecent images of children, there were 211 in the UK, 38 have been dealt with to date.

The largest number of subscribers were based in the US, Det Supt Gibson said.

The operation was run jointly by Lincolnshire Police and CEOP but nearly all of the UK’s forces, from Strathclyde to Devon and Cornwall, were involved in the investigation.

Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Northamptonshire police all contributed direct operational support.

Lincolnshire Police, along with CEOP, teamed up with Serious Organised Crime Agency and several international law enforcement agencies to bring the network down.

The force said that of those subscribers investigated in Britain so far, nearly two-thirds either admitted possession of indecent images, or the images were found upon initial analysis of the individual’s computers.

Police said the vast majority of the UK suspects had not previously come to the attention of the police.

In some cases, investigations into customers of the site revealed they were sexually abusing relatives or children known to them.

Detective Chief Superintendent Roger Bannister said: “Protecting and safeguarding children has been our main focus throughout this investigation and it is satisfying for those involved to see these really good results.

“It has always been in my mind, and that of the investigation team, that every single face in the millions of child abuse images in this case is someone’s daughter or son.”

He added: “I hope this case sends out a powerful message to people with a sexual interest in children worldwide - the internet is not a place for this kind of activity. We will trace you and you will be brought to justice.”

Peter Davies, the senior police officer heading up the CEOP Centre, said: “Many of the images being shared online were horrific.

“The lengths to which people went to try and conceal their criminal activity were huge but did not prevent them being caught by persistent and dedicated work.

“This not only brought offenders to justice but enabled children at high risk to be safeguarded and protected.”

He added: “Offenders out there thinking they can operate online anonymously should look at these results and think again.”