TORONTO (CP )
June 18, 2007

- Undercover Toronto police officers tipped off British authorities to a man hosting an Internet chat room with "hundreds of thousands" of images and videos of child abuse as part of a massive global sting that has sparked some 700 investigations, authorities revealed Monday.

The 27-year-old chat room host was handed an indeterminate jail sentence Monday at a court in eastern England, the same day police went public with a probe spanning 35 countries that has seen 31 children rescued.

Seven of the children are from Canada, Toronto police said.

Some were only a few months old.

Dubbed Project Wickerman by Canadian authorities, the operation has its roots in an investigation into an Edmonton man in mid-2005. Twenty-four people have been arrested in Canada since then.

In November 2005, undercover investigators from the Toronto Police Service's child exploitation unit infiltrated two U.S.-based chat rooms.

In March 2006, American authorities arrested the 49-year-old Tennessee man behind the chat rooms, known by the online handle 'G.O.D.'

The arrest temporarily closed the rooms, but Sgt. Paul Krawczyk, one of the undercover investigators from the Toronto Police Service's child exploitation unit, said a new site with many of the original's members was launched less than two weeks later by someone masquerading behind the online identity 'Son-of-god.'

Krawczyk described the chat room, called 'Kids the Light of Our Lives,' as a hierarchy where users gained the respect of other users by posting increasingly graphic content, including live videos of child abuse.

He said the chat room contained "hundreds of thousands" of images and videos.

"They want to get status and they want to become one of the top people in this chat room, and one of the ways of getting that is by saying, 'hey, I have access to a child or to children, and here's what I can do,' " Krawczyk said.

"It's sad, but it became almost abuse on demand."

Toronto police discovered the second chat room was being hosted from a site in the United Kingdom, Krawczyk said. Police tipped off the British-based Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, and together they began crafting a strategy for rounding up the site's host.

Krawczyk says authorities from the two agencies spent a week in Toronto developing a plan to nab host 'Son-of-god,' who also used the name 'I-do-it' when trading videos and images.

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre identified the man behind the second chat room as Timothy Cox.

British authorities quietly arrested Cox in September 2006 and charged him with nine child pornography-related offences.

The 27-year old was convicted at Ipswich Crown Court. His indeterminate jail sentence means he will remain in prison until authorities determine he is no longer a threat to children.

British forensic teams found nearly 76,000 "indecent and explicit" images on Cox's computer, in addition to evidence he supplied more than 11,000 images to other site users.

British authorities continued hosting the chat room, unbeknownst to its users. Authorities from the child exploitation centre, the Toronto police, the United States and Australia took turns monitoring the site, posing as chat room members to gain the trust of other users.

"We knew them better than they knew themselves," Krawczyk said.

A 33-year-old British man tried to resurrect the 'Kids the Light of Our Lives' site following Cox's September arrest.

Authorities monitored Gordon Mackintosh and other site members until Jan. 9 of this year, when they began a third series of arrests after 10 days of around the clock online surveillance.

Mackintosh has pleaded guilty to 27 child pornography-related charges.

Det.-Sgt. Kim Scanlan of Toronto's child exploitation unit said 10 of the 24 arrests in Canada have come after March 2006.

A total of 12 arrests have been made in Ontario, Scanlan said. The rest were made elsewhere in the country, but Toronto police declined to reveal where because the investigation is ongoing.

Police also wouldn't specify where the seven rescued children in Canada were from, except to say one was from Ontario.

U.S. officials declined to comment because of continuing investigations in at least 12 states.

Officials did not immediately provide a full breakdown of which countries were involved, but identified Canada, Australia and the United States as British officers' main partners in the investigation.

It was unclear whether any of the rescued children had been reported missing, but authorities said the investigation was not linked to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, 4, who vanished nearly two months ago when her parents left her and her young siblings in their hotel room while they dined at a restaurant in southern Portugal.

Scanlan wouldn't specify how many officers were involved in the operation, but said it was a "significant number."

"It was a real effort on behalf of the different agencies that do this kind of work," she said.

Paul Gillespie, former head of Toronto's child exploitation unit, said he is pleased to have seen "egos being left at the door" by the authorities involved in the investigation.

"We're now starting to get it figured out. We're now fighting together globally. We're not trying to do this by ourselves," he said.

"You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand it. If you don't share information in the way the bad guys do, then you're simply going to be ineffective."