Paramedic arrested as police smash internet paedophile ring

Police have arrested 46 people across the UK after a vile Italian website, which paraded as a respectable child modelling agency, was smashed.

A source revealed that British children are among the youngsters who have been rescued from lives of horrendous sexual abuse.

To a stranger, the site appeared to be reputable but paedophiles were able to access hidden pages where the films were advertised for sale.

Young girls were abused to order and the films were sold to thousands of sex offenders in 19 different countries.

Some of the users even travelled to the studio in Italy in order to watch and record the abuse, making their own private videos.

The films were all produced by a 42-year-old unnamed Italian national, who also ran the depraved website.

One of the films showed a father sexually abusing his daughters who were aged nine and 11. In all the Italian sold over 150 self-made, sexually explicit videos of girls.

The investigation began when one of the videos, which was made in Belgium, was discovered in Australia last year.

A Belgian perpetrator and two victims were identified.

Operation Koala was launched and the trail led to Bologna in northern Italy where the agency website owner was arrested.

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Investigators discovered he had been running the business for 18 months and had around 2,500 customers worldwide.

The abusive material was mainly produced in the his private studio though some was filmed in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Details of his "customers" - which included paedophiles in the UK - were passed on by the Italian authorities to Europol and Eurojust.

In June 2007, the material was passed to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre in London which analysed the information and gave details of individual suspects to their local police forces.

So far, 46 UK suspects have been arrested in operations involving 22 police forces with more arrests expected.

The British-based paramedic is one of those under suspicion but had not yet been arrested. Police refused to reveal any details about him.

The forces involved in Operation Koala include Bedfordshire; Cambridgeshire; Cheshire; Derbyshire; Devon and Cornwall; Durham; Essex; Gloucestershire; Grampian; Greater Manchester Police; Kent; Metropolitan Police; Norfolk; Northumbria; North Yorkshire; Northamptonshire; Police Service of Northern Ireland; Scottish Crime Drug Enforcement Agency; Surrey; Sussex; Strathclyde and Thames Valley Police.

Scotland Yard said they had arrested five individuals, more than any other single force.

They are a 39-year-old man from Hackney, a 61-year-old man from Bromley, a 55-year-old from Brixton who has previously been on the sex offenders register, a 23-year-old from Hillingdon and a 48-year-old from Orpington, Kent.

The men were arrested for possession, manufacturing and distribution of indecent images of children and have all been bailed.

Jim Gamble, Chief Executive of CEOP, said: "Yet again we see the technology used by paedophiles to facilitate child abuse now turned against them as a result of coordinated and effective international law enforcement cooperation.

"Operation Koala uncovered the true meaning of 'online child abuse': in this case, the exchanging of images in which real children were subjected to horrific sexual abuse, often to order.

"The work by Eurojust and Europol on this complex and dynamic investigation will, through working with partners internationally, make children safer in many different countries."