The Bari State Police conducted an operation, called “Revelatum”, to combat online child pornography, through the execution of 67 search decrees throughout the national territory, which led to the arrest of 8 people and the denunciation of another 59 for possession, transfer and disclosure of child pornography material. The investigation was carried out by the Postal Police of Foggia and Bari with the coordination of the Postal and Communications Police Service – Cncpo (National Center for the Fight against Online Child Pornography), under the direction of the Bari District Prosecutor.
The investigation lasted a year and a half and started with an anonymous report relating to the presence of child pornography within a cloud. The experts of the Apulian Postal Police then analyzed the images that portrayed minors in sexually explicit acts. Videos and photos were then “categorized according to severity”, explain the investigators, and used to reconstruct the computer traces left by the subjects who had come into contact with them for various reasons. At that point, the Public Prosecutor issued the search decrees, extended to the computer systems of the suspects, which allowed the operators to inspect and seize about 60 devices, as well as numerous virtual spaces.
Overall, the seized material amounts to more than 500 Terabytes in volume. In 8 cases of detention of large quantities of child pornography material, the officers proceeded to arrest in the act of committing a crime.
“The trend in the fight against child pornography marks a constant increase in cases – the investigators say -, discovered by the Postal Police thanks to constant monitoring of the network and citizens’ complaints and reports, with the aim of identifying the perpetrators and safeguarding and protecting the minors possibly involved “.