16 arrested over child porn on computers

Scores of police carried out dawn raids on residential addresses across Hong Kong yesterday and arrested 16 people - including three boys and a girl under 18 - suspected of downloading thousands of images of child pornography.

The raids, codenamed Pinpoint, were the culmination of a four-month-long investigation by police after they received information from overseas law enforcement agencies, including the United States Department of Homeland Security.

More than 4,600 still images, movies and video clips of child pornography stored on 18 computers were seized in the operation, which was continuing last night.

Detectives did not say whether any of the suspects - 13 males and three females, the oldest of whom was 52 - knew each other, but they said the suspects had all downloaded the material individually.

Initial investigations suggested the child pornography was downloaded from overseas websites and saved on the suspects' personal computers, police said.

Despite the huge number of images seized, Superintendent Chiu Sau-mee of the commercial crime bureau's technology crime division said: 'We believe that most of them were doing this out of curiosity. There is no evidence to suggest that they downloaded child pornography for circulation or commercial purposes.'

Police said none of the suspects, who are all Hong Kong residents, was in frequent contact with children in their jobs and none had a record of sex offences.