COIMBATORE: The police, on Sunday, arrested a 25-year-old man for uploading Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) on social media sites, a day after the arrest of a native of Assam on similar charges.
The arrested person was identified as R Sathyamoorthy from Pothampalayam in Tirupur district. The police said, Sathyamoorthy works as a driver at a private engineering college situated at Sulur.
The social media cell of the Coimbatore police found that he had often uploaded child sexual abuse material on Facebook. After tracing his location they formally sent a written complaint to Sulur Police on Saturday.
Police registered a case against the driver on Sunday under sections 13 (Use of child for pornographic purposes), 14 (i) (Punishment for using child for pornographic purposes), 15 (Punishment for storage of pornographic material involving child) of the POCSO Act and also for storing explicit content involving children.
The police also booked a case with sections 67(B), 67 B (b) of the Information Technology Act (Punishment for publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form).
The police said the suspect used his own Facebook page to share explicit content which he had downloaded from other social media platforms in order to get more traffic to his page. His mobile phone with the shared contents was seized.
Past arrests in child pornography cases
Will Heum of Netherlands arrested in Chennai in 2009
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.
42-year-old railway contract worker from Tiruchy was arrested in December 2019
A native of Assam was held in Pollachi on Saturday on similar charges
Crackdown
Additional Director General of Police (ADGP) M Ravi had said last year that TN police will launch a crackdown against those viewing child pornography.