Child Porn Crackdown

Police have made 60 arrests over six weeks as part of a nationwide crackdown on who people who buy child pornography off the Internet, a force spokesman said today.

Around 200 officers were involved in the operation which included searching more than 50 homes and seizing hard drives from around 100 computers.

Northumbria Police removed thousands of CDs and floppy disks for analysis by its computer crime unit.

A total of 56 men and four women have been arrested and released on bail pending further inquiries.

No further action is being taken against one further man who was arrested.

One had hidden more 12,000 indecent images of children inside an off-the-shelf computer game stored on his computer.

The operation in the north east began when officers studied data about British Internet users who bought access to child porn sites from an American website.

The arrests came after weeks of tracing addresses across Tyne and Wear and Northumberland from credit card details.

Detective Chief Inspector Michael Jones said: "They might be able to hide it from their wives or partners, but they can't hide it from the police."

The offence of possessing indecent photographs of children carries a maximum sentence of five years while making or distributing such images has a 10 year sentence.

Anyone convicted of such offences would automatically be put on the Sex Offenders Register.