Spanish police have arrested 27 people suspected of distributing child pornography over the Internet in one of their largest crackdowns, they said today.
The raids on Monday and Tuesday also yielded an enormous quantity of paedophile material in searches of the suspects' homes, including thousands of files of pornographic images on some 30 computers, police said.
The arrests were part of an investigation codenamed Operation Troy, launched in May after police established that Spanish-language chat rooms were being used to offer and solicit "horrifying images" of children being sexually abused.
As well as swapping images online, Internet users arranged to meet in private chat rooms to organise delivery of pornographic material in ways which were harder to trace, such as conventional post and file-transfer systems, police said.
Investigators are now working with police in other countries to try to trace the producers of the images, official sources said.
