Police yesterday were investigating allegations that an international child pornography ring exploited children as young as two and distributed their images worldwide via the Internet.
"The investigation focuses on child pornography in all its facets - the production and distribution of the material," a local police spokesman said, adding that police were not yet in possession of the alleged pornographic material.
The inquiry follows a report by an anti-pornography group that it found thousands of computer discs in a flat in the Dutch seaside town of Zandvoort. The discs contained pornographic pictures of children, the Dutch current affairs television programme, NOVA, reported.
The police spokesman would give no further details of the case pending the outcome of the investigation. He also declined to comment on reports that Dutch police were working with Belgian and German authorities.
A spokesman for the Belgian anti-pornography group, Morkhoven, has said it made the find in Zandvoort. The group passed some of the images to NOVA, but the programme makers decided they were too disturbing to broadcast on Dutch television.
"We are waiting for the [pornographic material] to be handed over, then it will be used in our investigation," the police spokesman said. According to the German newspaper, Berliner Morgenpost, Morkhoven stumbled across the discs during a search for a Berlin boy who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1993 when he was 12.
The trail led Morkhoven to the Netherlands and finally to the Zandvoort flat, the newspaper said. The child pornography network, which Berliner Morgenpost said stretches around the globe, has its centre in Berlin.
It was not clear how Morkhoven gained access to the address. The property's owner, allegedly a member of the ring, was reportedly murdered by another gang member early this year in Italy.
According to NOVA, the pornographic pictures uncovered in the flat were stored on thousands of high density discs.
Morkhoven suspects the images were passed via the Internet to a regular group of customers.
It claims the Zandvoort operation was part of an international network of child pornography producers and consumers, extending to the US, Russia and Israel.
Dutch anti-pornography campaigners have long complained there is insufficient regulation of the Internet.
One local group, Meldpunt Kinderporno, wrote to the Dutch government recently urging the introduction of measures to combat child pornography on the worldwide web.
Christopher Zinn adds from Sydney: Police suspect a series of gruesome gay hate killings in the Sydney region could be the work of a serial killer whose victims might be linked through a notorious paedophile ring.
The latest mutilation murder was that of Australia's longest serving mayor, Frank Arkell, aged 68, who was bludgeoned to death in his flat and who had previously faced 29 child sex charges.
In the past few months two other men, one a convicted child sex offender, were attacked in their homes in similar circumstances and also suffered horrific injuries.
Arkell, the former Lord Mayor of Wollongong, 50 miles south of Sydney, was a key witness in a royal commission into police corruption which uncovered a network of paedophiles.