After more than two years of investigation, police in Cologne, Germany, announced on Wednesday that they had identified more than 400 suspected members of a pedophile network.
The investigations carried out since 2019 have enabled the hundreds of police officers mobilized to identify a total of 439 suspects throughout Germany. About 100 of them came from the region of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous in the country.
These suspects come “from all walks of life,” said the head of the investigation group, Michael Esser, at a press conference on Wednesday.
“They went about their business normally and nothing in their work environment indicated that such acts had been committed,” he added.
65 child victims
Investigators identified 65 children, under the age of 17, as victims of this pedophile network. In the majority of cases, the alleged perpetrator is a member of the close family environment.
In the context of this case, several sentences, thirteen in total, have already been pronounced against members of this network, and in particular its leader Jörg L., sentenced in October 2020 to twelve years in prison for acts of ‘sexual abuse, rape, including of close children, and dissemination of child pornography.
Dubbed the “Bergisch Gladbach abuse complex”, this pedophile network was dismantled after the arrest in 2019 of this leader, in his 40s.