(Málaga province) The Public Prosecutor is recommending a 6-year prison sentence for the member of the Fuengirola local police that was caught with 816 child pornography images on his computer. He also stands accused of circulating these images via the Internet.
The now ex-policeman was arrested on the 6th of May, 2009. The Policia Nacional obtained a search warrant for his house and found 224 CD’s & DVD’s, containing 816 videos and photographs. They also confiscated two hard discs and found an Internet programme (eMule) for exchanging files with which he had placed several child-porn video clips on the Internet.
The Policia Nacional had received a tipoff on the 1st of December, 2008, when a man went into the Valencia police headquarters. The man complained that when he had attempted to download a video game, he had ended up with a video containing child-porn images.
The information was handed over to the Grupo de Delitos Tecnológicos de la Policia. Subsequent investigation uncovered that there were several Internet users in Spain that had also downloaded the files. They had soon identified two IP addresses that were exchanging these files.
This lead to the arrest of the Fuengirola IP user. As the man turned out to be a policeman of officer rank, he was immediately suspended from his post. The accused has been given early retirement for health reasons.
His defence lawyers, belonging to the Herrera and Abalos Law firm recommended that he should be fully acquitted as he is not the author of the material and that their client is a compulsive collector of video games. The defence also argues that their client does not speak English and therefore does not have knowledge of the terminology (jerga) used to describe the video content.
The defence also argues that the file was not completely downloaded and that the pornographic material only represents 0.011% of the total off all archives on his computer, thus the defence does not believe this percentage represents a tendency.
(News: Fuengirola, Costa del Sol, Malaga, Andalucia)