Virginia officials say 20 people across the state were taken into custody from an undercover investigation targeting online child predators.
Arrests have taken place in Fairfax, Prince William and Loudoun counties, as well as in Bedford, Virginia Beach and Richmond, state officials announced Thursday. Suspects are facing charges of online solicitation of a minor and distribution of child pornography. Another 20 cases were referred to investigators outside of Virginia.
“It’s really disturbing when you think about the sheer number of images that we’re talking about,” said Col. Steven Flaherty, the Virginia State Police superintendent. He described one case in which thousands of explicit images were found on a Fairfax man’s computer and cell phone.
“Basically, his life revolved around distributing and possessing child pornography,” Flaherty said. “In every photo, there was a young girl or a young boy who was a victim, their innocence stolen.”
A Virginia State Police spokeswoman said nine of the arrests took place in Northern Virginia. Those suspects charged with use of communications systems to facilitate offenses involving children and attempted indecent liberties with a child include 35-year-old Anarug Sharma of Fairfax, Kenneth Maleski of Maryland, and 52-year-old Joseph Confoy of Ashburn. Two Harrisonburg men, 32-year-old Sean Passerelli and 23-year-old Kyle Bruns, were charged with attempted indecent liberties.
Authorities wouldn’t release the other suspects’ names, saying it would jeopardize other ongoing investigations. Officials said the weeklong operation happened in 2011, but would not be more specific.
Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said the effort was the first time Virginia’s two Internet Crimes Against Children, or ICAC, task forces had joined together for a concentrated, statewide crackdown.
“This was a focus of resources for a period of time to flush out some of the bad guys,” Cuccinelli said. He said the goal was to obtain a “more than usual” number of arrests.
Officials said they are seeing a rise in cases involving online child sex predators and are training more investigators in that field.
Last year, the Northern Virginia ICAC task force examined 34,000 gigabytes of data, a 75 percent increase from the previous year, Flaherty said.
The crackdown netted arrests of child pornography distributors, operators of online message boards that shared explicit files and people who solicited children online and arranged to physically meet them to have sex.
A Loudoun man who thought he was chatting online with a 14-year-old child, “readily came to meet” with what turned out to be an undercover investigator, Flaherty said. In another instance, police thought a child pornography distributor was in Virginia, but determined he was actually based in Europe. Investigators overseas are now probing the case.
