Media re “Project Sanctuary”

Child porn ring cracked

    

Winnipeg Free Press – PRINT EDITION

Posted: 9/12/2010 1:00 AM |  

By: Pat Hewitt

TORONTO — A clown, a former Anglican priest, a university researcher and a convicted pedophile were among 25 Canadians arrested after authorities cracked an international child porn network in a year-long investigation, police said Wednesday.

They said 25 children victimized by the network were rescued, including a dozen in Canada. They said the Canadian children were from three provinces — Ontario, British Columbia and Newfoundland and Labrador — and the youngest was four years old.

Toronto police Det. Paul Krawczyk said the network was trading images and video of children online and the motive wasn’t financial gain.

“It’s just for their perverted sexual desires these images are traded,” he said. “It has nothing to do with money.”

Twenty-six Americans and six Europeans were also arrested. Together, the 57 men face 218 charges in Project Sanctuary. The Canadians, who are aged 20 to 68 and come from all walks of life, face 131 charges, police said.

The victims included both boys and girls, said Krawczyk. Four of those rescued were from Ottawa, he added.

“It’s terrible what these children go through,” the detective said.

Police released the names of some of those charged, including former priest Robin Barrett, clown Randy Miller, York University research associate Richard Dyde, security expert Daniel Clayton and convicted sex offender David Caza.

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of child pornography images — some of babies — were seized during the probe, police said. The case stretched across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe.

The probe involved 13 Canadian police agencies — including the RCMP, the Ontario and Quebec provincial police forces, U.S. Homeland Security and authorities in Britain and Germany.

None of the children rescued had been abducted or had been runaways.

“We have to work as tirelessly as we can to track down the people who think it’s OK to trade and talk about these images, let alone the people who actually produce them,” said Krawczyk.

Eighteen of the 25 Canadians, who were charged between November 2009 and this month, have been publicly identified by police. Others are related to victims and won’t be publicly named, police said.

Three men, including the man who sparked the investigation, have already been convicted.

Ten of those arrested and publicly identified by police are from Ontario, including seven from Toronto. Others are from the Ontario communities of Barrie, Bowmanville, Newmarket and Richmond Hill, while two each are from Vancouver and Regina. Other suspects are from Kamloops, B.C., Calgary, Sylvan Lake, Alta., and Quebec.

The probe began in Conception Bay South, N.L., in November 2009 when authorities found Barrett, the ex-priest, trading child abuse images online.

– The Canadian Press

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 9, 2010 A10

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7 GTA men arrested in international child porn probe 

thestar.com

Published On Wed Dec 8 2010

Henry Stancu Staff Reporter

An Anglican priest, professional clown, university researcher and residence don are among the Canadian men arrested in an international Internet child porn sweep.

A high-profile B.C. sex offender was also one of the many suspects rounded up in the year-long multi-force investigation.

The child exploitation and image trading network has been shut down with the arrests of 57 men, including 25 in Canada and seven in the GTA, police said Wednesday.

Project Sanctuary began with the arrest of a priest in Newfoundland last December, a month after police intercepted images of child pornography during the initial online sting that soon spread to include 13 police agencies in Canada, the U.S. and Europe.

Rev. Robin Barrett, 51, of Conception Bay South was the first to be charged and he was sentenced to a 2½-year jail term in September.

Investigators traced the images of 45 children, aged 4 to 15, which were produced and swapped on the Internet by men in North America and across the Atlantic.

The images were of boys and girls. Some of the men arrested are not being identified because they are related to the victims, police say.

“(Project) Sanctuary was chosen because it talks about a place where people can get away from danger,” Toronto police Det. Paul Krawczyk of the sex crimes unit told a news conference.

Unfortunately, “the trading of these images will never go away” as they are permanently in the public domain every time they were saved on users’ computers, Krawczyk said.

Following the arrest in Newfoundland, police forces in the GTA, across Canada, the U.S. and Europe worked together to track people active in the child porn network.

Krawczyk said those arrested were from all walks of life and ranged in age from 20 to 68. Some have already been convicted and sentenced to jail terms ranging from 30 months to 25 years.

The 25 Canadian men face a total of 131 charges. Krawczyk did not reveal specifics, saying only that “the way they were sharing images online is a commonality.”

He said 25 children, including 12 in Canada, have been rescued and taken into the care of local child protection agencies or relatives.

“It’s terrible what these children go through,” said Krawczyk. “When you look into the children’s eyes every day, how can you not go to every length to stop it?”

Among those arrested in the Toronto area are: York University fellow Richard Dyde, 47, and Toby Stimpson, 24, a York University residence don, both charged with various counts of making available and possessing child pornography.

Dyde was additionally charged with making child pornography.

Others arrested in the GTA are: Jonah Whitehouse, 31, of Toronto, Erin Holder (a.k.a. Erin Wilson), 26, of Toronto, Michael Pellow, 68, of Toronto, Christopher Holowatyj, 20, of Newmarket, and Trevor Partridge, 44, of Bowmanville. Kevin Sheppard, 41, of Barrie also faces charges.

Randy Miller, 40, of Napanee, a professional clown known as Honker and a volunteer beaver scout leader, faces a sexual assault charge and two counts of making and possessing child pornography.

Also arrested in Project Sanctuary was David Caza, 47, a convicted pedophile who made headlines in October 2005 when he was released from prison and settled in Merritt, B.C.

Intense public pressure forced Caza to move to Kamloops, where rallies drew residents opposed to his presence there.

With a lengthy criminal record that includes 42 convictions, Caza was found guilty of nine sexual offences, one involving three teenaged boys.

He refused all treatment while in prison and in 2007 Caza was acquitted on a charge of breaching his probation.

In a violation of a court order, Caza had travelled to Saskatchewan and lived on the streets thus unable to provide his probation officer with a fixed address. A judge called his situation a catch-22 before acquitting Caza. 

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Man who shot pornographic pictures of eight-year-old sentenced to five years in prison

 Ottawa Citizen

December 8, 2010

 By Andrew Seymour,

An Ottawa child porn collector who snapped photographs of himself sexually abusing a friend’s eight-year-old daughter as she slept was sentenced to five years in prison Wednesday.

Tyler Hussey, 30, admitted to possessing 427 pornographic images of the girl, including some where his hand could be seen touching the girl’s private parts or moving her bathing suit to the side. The images were among 1,113 pictures of the girl Hussey had on his computer.

The photos were part of a collection of what a prosecutor described as 10,000 pictures and 1,000 movies of “hard core” pornography containing what Ontario Court Justice Lise Maisonneuve described as “violent scenes of sexual assault” on children as young as infants.

Hussey was in the process of downloading more child pornography when Ottawa police arrested him in March. A roommate discovered the child pornography along with pictures of a friend’s daughter and told her mother, who called police.

“The very notion that Mr. Hussey chose to take the pictures of this child would be repulsive to any member of society,” said Maisonneuve before sentencing Hussey, who pleaded guilty earlier this year to two counts of sexual interference along with one count each of making and accessing child pornography.

Maisonneuve said Hussey betrayed the trust of the victim’s mother to gain access, photograph and sexually abuse the girl.

She found the age of Hussey’s victim, his position of trust, the fact the photos were taken on four separate occasions and that he appeared in some were all aggravating. His decision to view the photos of the girl, along with the sheer volume of his collection, were also of concern, Maisonneuve said, although the making of the child pornography was his most serious offence.

A psychiatrist who examined him said there was evidence to “strongly suggest” Hussey is a pedophile, although test results were inconclusive, Maisonneuve said. The doctor also found he is a low to moderate risk to reoffend, if he’s treated.

Maisonneuve said Hussey, a heavy-set man with brown shaggy hair who told the court he was himself abused as a child, entered an early guilty plea, was genuinely remorseful and showed a strong desire for treatment, but a prison sentence was needed to deter others from committing similar crimes.

Hussey was given credit for 13 months of pre-sentence custody, leaving him three years and 11 months of his sentence left to serve. He was also added to the sex-offender registry.

aseymour@ottawacitizen.com

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 Arrests include pedophile who abused two-year-old

 The Ottawa Citizen 

By Randy Boswell,; with files from the National Post December 9, 2010 

As the Toronto police child-exploitation unit trumpeted the results Wednesday of its massive Project Sanctuary arrest blitz, a Florida man first identified by one of the Canadian investigators as a child-porn producer and purveyor was serving his first week in prison after receiving a 25-year sentence for his crimes on Monday. 

Aaron Dawkins, a 28-year-old resident of Shalimar, Florida, has the grim distinction of having sexually assaulted the very youngest of the many dozens of victims rescued from abuse through the probe carried out by the Toronto-based Internet sleuths and their partner organizations across Canada and around the world. 

Toronto police Det. Paul Krawczyk, an investigator with the force’s sex crimes unit, confirmed that Dawkins was among those snared in the dragnet. 

“You can’t begin to describe what these children go through,” Dawkins said earlier. 

“I can tell you that some of the (images of) victims we saw early in this investigation we continued to see in the latter stages of the investigation.” 

Dawkins was arrested in June after a Toronto officer tipped police in the United States to his illegal trading of pornographic photographs and videos depicting children. 

Among the seized material were images showing Dawkins sexually abusing a two-year-old child. 

According to a statement issued Monday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for northern Florida, Dawkins was targeted after “an undercover police officer in Toronto, Canada, learned that Dawkins was sharing child pornography on a publicly available peer-to-peer file sharing network.” 

After the tip was passed to U.S. authorities, “the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement got involved and were able to download child pornography directly from Dawkins over the Internet.” 

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Global child-porn bust lands in Ottawa  

Four area children rescued from image-trading ring, police say 

The Ottawa Citizen 

December 9, 2010 6:49 AM 

By Ken Meaney, with files from Claire Brownell,   

Four Ottawa-area children were rescued as part of a year-long international investigation into an Internet child pornography network, Toronto police announced Wednesday. 

Toronto Police Det.-Const. Janelle Blackadar said the youngest child rescued from Ottawa was four years old, among the youngest of the 25 children rescued worldwide. She could not provide details about how the rescue took place or where the children were from originally. 

A man from Ottawa was arrested last spring as part of the same investigation, Blackadar said. He was charged with possession of child pornography and making child pornography available. 

Det. Paul Krawczyk of the Toronto Police sex crimes unit said images of the same children kept showing up throughout the investigation. 

“I can tell you that some of the victims we saw early in this investigation we continued to see in the latter stages of the investigation,” he said. “It’s boys and girls, of all ages.” 

The Toronto police sex crimes unit launched the investigation, called Project Sanctuary, in November 2009. Undercover police officers infiltrated the global child pornography ring using intelligence gathered during the arrest of Robin Barrett, a 51-year-old Anglican priest from Conception Bay South, N.L. 

An investigation involving police forces from Germany, the United Kingdom and across Canada has resulted in 218 charges of child exploitation to date. Krawczyk said the number of sexual abuse images traded by the network is in “the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.” 

Worldwide, 57 men have been charged, including 25 Canadians. Ten of the 25 children rescued were found in Canada. 

Police said some of the men have not been identified in order to protect the identities of their victims. 

Those who were named, however, come from every walk of life: Randy Miller, a 40-year-old balloon artist from Napanee, Ont., went by the stage name Honker the Clown. Richard Dyde is a 47-year-old researcher who appeared on national television to talk about astronauts in zero gravity, and David Clayton, 29, is a former British Special Forces soldier who recently operated a Calgary security consulting company. 

While the investigation has wrapped up, the images are still available on the Internet, exposing the children to exploitation every time they’re viewed, Krawczyk said. 

“You can’t begin to describe what these children go through,” he said. “We have to work as tirelessly as we can to track down the people who think it is OK to trade and talk about these images, let alone the people who actually produce them.”