Here's something I just found from a link on Worldnetdaily.com. It's an Excite.com story on the pedophile ring that's been covered on this site for about a couple of weeks.

vM

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1,491 Charged in Internet Pedophilia Case
Updated 1:09 PM ET October 28, 2000By Julia Hancock

ROME (Reuters) - An Italian prosecutor has charged 1,491 Italians and foreign nationals with offering or downloading child pornography on the Internet in what could become one of the biggest trials in Italy, newspapers said on Saturday,

Prosecutor Alfredo Ormanni has ordered 831 Italians to stand trial and has called for 660 foreigners to be tracked down and sent to Italy to answer the charges.

The child pornography case is focused around a pedophile ring based in Russia uncovered a month ago.

It was not immediately clear if extradition requests or international arrest warrants had been issued for those accused outside Italy and believed to be mainly in Russia, France and Malaysia, the papers said.

The huge number of people were trapped in a complex exercise involving a fake pedophile Internet Web site set up by Italian authorities, police and the world's biggest software company, Microsoft.

The site, called "amantideibambini" ("loversofchildren"), registered 1,032 subscribers despite a number of clear warnings to make sure they wanted to enter it.

A number of those charged, none of them Italian, have been accused of offering pornographic material over the Internet. The vast majority face charges of downloading child pornography.

The charges were made exactly a month after the pedophile scandal erupted in Italy following a swoop on 600 homes in the country. Eight people were initially arrested in Italy on charges of possessing and trading in child pornography, all of it from Russia.

Three people were at first believed to have been detained in Russia in connection with the pedophile ring but the reports were later found to be false.

POLICE SAY CHILDREN KIDNAPPED

A police operation specializing in Internet crime and based near the port city of Naples reported that the Russian pedophile ring ran an operation to kidnap children from orphanages, circuses and public parks and film them while they were forced to commit sexual acts.

In Italy, packages ordered on the Internet were intercepted when they arrived by mail and were repacked. They were then delivered to the addresses by undercover police officers disguised as postal workers and carrying hidden cameras.

The material cost between $400 and $6,000 for each video or disc depending on the type of film the customer wanted -- the more horrific, the more costly.

The service was divided into several categories. "SNIPE" was the term given by the ring for videos of children filmed nude without their knowledge.

"CP" was the code word for ordering an item from a pedophile's "private collection."

The most gruesome, police said, was coded "Necros Pedo," in which children were raped and tortured to death.

Italian prosecutor Ormanni told Italian news agency ANSA he believed those accused in Italy would cooperate with the court and may thereby avoid a jail sentence.

"But the important thing is to succeed in freeing at least one of the children who appear in those horrendous pictures," Ormanni said. "If we do succeed, we will have achieved a large part of our goal."