A German court on Monday jailed five men for running a darknet website where hundreds of thousands of users shared images and videos of child sexual abuse.
The men aged between 44 and 63 were sentenced to prison terms ranging from five and a half to 10 and a half years, a spokesman for the court in Moenchengladbach, western Germany, said.
The judges ruled that one of the men must be kept in preventative detention once his sentence ends due to the high probability that he would reoffend.
The platform, known as Alice in Wonderland, was shut down after being targeted in nationwide raids in September 2024.
During their trial, which began in October, the men “largely confessed to the charges” against them, the court spokesman said.
Prosecutors had accused them of being “active as moderators or administrators” of the platform between March 2019 and September 2024.
“The primary purpose of this platform was to provide its members with child and youth pornographic content and to serve as a place to exchange this content,” they said.
One of the men’s tasks was allegedly “to ensure that users were made unrecognisable in self-produced content in order to make subsequent prosecution more difficult”.
The platform was also used to facilitate meetings between users where they would abuse children, the prosecutors said.
The defendants also allegedly possessed images and videos of children themselves, with some of those featured just one year old.
After the raids, authorities said the site was one of the longest-running platforms of its kind and had been used to share millions of images and videos.
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