TIRUCHI: A 42-year-old railway contract worker from Tiruchy was arrested here by police on Thursday for uploading and sharing Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) (commonly referred to as child pornography) on social media websites.
Police sources said that the accused used three fake identities to share explicit content which he had downloaded from other social media platforms. Reportedly this is the first arrest related to child porn in TN since the POCSO Act was amended earlier this year.
Police said that Christopher Alphonse (42) of Palakarai was a contract worker in the Railways department in Tiruchy. The Tiruchy cyber crime police, based on reports from their counterparts in Chennai about activity on multiple social media accounts, conducted a thorough investigation and monitored his activity on social media. After they reportedly caught Alphonse red-handed, he was taken into custody for questioning.
Police said that he had uploaded and shared child abuse content through three fake identities as Nilavan, Aadavan and another name.
"In the course of questioning him, we learnt that he has been downloading child pornography videos and photographs from websites and was uploading them to Facebook pages. Also, the accused has been sending such materials through Facebook messenger to several other people. This was later confirmed when looking into his activity on the messaging application," a senior police official from Tiruchy said.
The official added that the accused had sent such explicit material to minors on social media - an offence under POCSO.
Alphonse has been booked under multiple sections of the POCSO Act including Section 13, 14, and 15 for using a child for pornographic purposes and also storing explicit content involving children. He has also been booked under Sections 67 (A, B, C) of the Information Technology Act for uploading and sharing child pornography on social media sites.
On Thursday, he was produced before a magistrate and remanded to judicial custody for further investigations.
Tamil Nadu police claimed this was the first such arrest made by the department itself as previously such cases were handled by the CB-CID.
The first arrest for child pornography, under provisions of the IT Act, was made in Chennai In 2009 when Will Heum of Netherlands was arrested. Heum had lived in India for 30 years and had been booked in 2002 for abusing boys in a children's home in Mahabalipuram. Based on a tip-off from Interpol, he was arrested for uploading images of children being sexually abused to the Internet. He was convicted in 2011.
In 2015, Manikandan Prabhu, a resident of Pollachi Taluk in Coimbatore, and Yadava Manikanta of Tirupati, were arrested under POCSO and IT Acts for uploading photos of children on Facebook pages, including on a page called ‘Chinna Ponnu Veriyargal' (crazy for small girls). Members of the pages would respond to the photos of fully dressed children, mostly female, with graphic and sexually explicit comments. Facebook took the pages down. The cases are still being tried.