As the country partakes in the last week of the 16 Days of Activism of No Violence Against Women and Children campaign, a Cape Town court heard a horrible case of an elderly man who distributed nearly 3,000 child pornographic images.

According to the National Prosecuting Authority’s (NPA) Eric Ntabazalila, the Wynberg Regional Court convicted 66-year-old Jan Hendrick le Roux on illegal possession and illegal distribution of a total of 2,950 child pornographic images. The court sentenced him to an effective eight years imprisonment for each of the charges.

The successful prosecution came after the court’s prosecutor Xolani Ncobo proved beyond reasonable doubt that the accused was part of an international child pornography network.

It is believed that this network not only shared child pornographic images, but also discussed child abduction and child sexual abuse.

The State submitted evidence that the accused was part of an international child pornography network on the dark web.

Le Roux was initially arrested after Belgian police arrested a Belgian suspect for the same charges, who shared child pornographic material with the accused using a peer-to-peer network.

The Belgian investing officer took over the IP address of the man they arrested and went undercover to trace other IP addresses.

Le Roux’s IP address was one of those traced to South Africa.

The court heard Le Roux claimed to have obtained the pornography for “investigative purposes”.

In his defence testimony, Le Roux claimed he was sexually abused as a child and never received any trauma counselling.

He admitted to having the images after importing them from the dark web. According to him, he wanted to see if the people sharing the images were a group of paedophiles like the people who molested him when he was young.

When Ncobo asked the accused how he was going to establish that the people in the dark web were the same people who molested him, the court did not hear a clear answer.

Ncobo further argued that users on the dark web used pseudonyms, and there was no way the accused would have known who they were.

IOL NEWS