This is a part of the police crackdown against those who had viewed, downloaded, stored or shared child sexual abuse content online.
A 49-year-old man was arrested at Chennai Airport on Saturday night for downloading child sexual abuse material and sharing it online.
According to reports, Sumit Kumar Kalra is a computer science graduate and owns a shop that sells gym equipment on Montieth Road, Egmore. On Saturday night, as he landed in Chennai from Delhi, the police of the Crime against Women and Children wing nabbed him. The police had received information about the crime from the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, which has the technology to monitor child pornography material shared online.
As per the police, Sumit had downloaded child sexual abuse material from the dark web on April 29, 2019 and had shared it with a friend over Facebook Messenger. They had also matched Sumit’s phone number and the IP address used to share the content. The police also told the Times of India that Sumit had used different browsers to remain anonymous. Though the accused had initially denied his crime, when the police confronted him with evidence, he confessed to his involvement.
He has been booked under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) and Information Technology Act and has been remanded to judicial custody.
The Chennai police had, in December, announced that they had with them around 1500 IP addresses that had shared child sexual abuse content online and that they were monitoring at least three gangs that had created, stored and circulated child sexual abuse content. The Chennai police had also nominated Jayashree, the SP in-charge of Crime against Women and Children as the nodal officer for coordinating with the district police offices to act against child sexual abuse material.
In December, the police arrested a 42-year-old man from Trichy for storing and sharing child sexual abuse material online. On January 4, a 23-year-old man from Assam was held in Pollachi for sharing child sexual abuse material on Facebook and a day later, the Coimbatore police also arrested a 25-year-old man, who worked as a bus driver in a private engineering college in the city, for viewing and sharing child sexual abuse videos online.
Source: The News Minute