Revealed: The worldwide child porn web run from a sleepy Lincolnshire hamlet

Det Supt Paul Gibson said that when officers from the small Lincolnshire force walked into Ian Frost’s living room and found the piece of computer equipment on the floor that was used to run the news servers, they knew specialists would need to be called in carry out forensic examinations.

The fact that the technically intricate news service was being operated from Martin Dales - a small hamlet just a few miles away from Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire - made it even more of a revelation.

DS Gibson said: “I think it’s fair to say that it was a bit of a shock to find something so big being operated from a rural county.

“We’re one of the smallest forces in the country but it’s a real proud achievement to say that Lincolnshire Police has taken on this global investigation, along with CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre), in order to achieve the successes we’ve achieved.”

DS Gibson said the IT backgrounds shared by the group meant they were able to carry out the operation efficiently and to great profit.

“Certainly from Ian Frost’s point of view, clearly he’s very technically proficient, to operate a news service like this is not something a normal person could do, it needed a great deal of IT knowledge,” he said.

“When he was arrested he basically admitted to running these news services and it was then down to us identify and view these five million images, to view 1.5 million emails and to view all the other information that came from the computers in order to piece together exactly what had occurred.”

DS Gibson said he was certain that all four men had “some degree of knowledge” about the illegal child content that was on the news servers and the fact that Rowland also pleaded guilty to possession of indecent images of children revealed some of his motive.

However, for Rowland and the other three, the reason behind running the news servers was purely financial.

DS Gibson said: “My personal view is that this was a commercial enterprise with the primary aim of making money.

“Between them they’ve received a total benefit from these news services of over £2.2 million, that’s a huge amount of money.”

Wading through the huge virtual library of images and movies - a copy taken from the Athenanews server in January 2008 contained over 69,000 indecent images of children, which represented nearly 40% of all of the images found - and grading them to categorise the severity of pornography, took its toll on investigating officers.

Making sure officers viewing the “horrific” content were properly supported was imperative, DS Gibson said.

“It was very, very difficult for the officers concerned,” he said, “certainly it was my intent from the outset to make sure that the officers were correctly looked after.

“However I think it’s important to say that each of those images is a window in trying to identify a child. The priority here was always to safeguard children, and we’ve managed to do that.”

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

The group were responsible for running uncensored news services on the internet which allowed subscribers in 46 countries across the globe to access child abuse content.