A 20-year-old Computer Engineering student was under investigation for produce images of child sexual abuse with photographs of students from the Esteban Echeverría school where he had studied and files made with artificial intelligence (AI).
This was reported to THE NATION qualified judicial sources. In the next few hours, the suspect will be investigated by the Gender Prosecutor Lorena Pecorelli, in charge of the Prosecutor’s Office No. 2 of the Judicial Department of La Matanza.
“The suspect published the images he produced on various platforms. He used photographs of the faces of students from the school where he had studied, which he collected from social networks and he made the bodies with AI,” said a source with access to the file.
In the last few hours, according to the sources consulted, the suspect’s home was raided, located in Esteban Echeverría, in the same area where the victims of the images he produced are studying.
The investigation by prosecutor Pecorelli, prosecutor assistant Daniela Sánchez and criminal secretary Jazmin Pellegrino was part of the so-called Operation Child Protection VIwhere 117 simultaneous and coordinated raids were carried out in 73 locations in the province of Buenos Aires.
“This is the sixth operation of this nature, carried out by the prosecutors responsible for grooming, cyberpedophilia and child sexual abuse of the Public Ministry of the province of Buenos Aires, headed by the Attorney General, Julio Conte Grand,” it was reported in a press release.
And it was added: “This joint action seeks to disrupt networks of sexual offenders and attack the proliferation of online child sexual abuse. In addition to prosecuting the distribution of child sexual abuse material, possession, its possible production and online sexual harassment (commonly known as grooming) are included among those investigated.”
The procedures were coordinated by the Department of Crimes Related to Human Trafficking, Cyberpedophilia and Grooming, which depends on the Criminal Policy Secretariat of the Attorney General’s Office, together with prosecutors specialized in the subject.
As officially reported, 112 suspects were under investigation, including the aforementioned student, a children’s theater teacher, a soccer coach, two police officers and three adolescents under 16 years of age.
Among the places raided were three prisons, where prisoners accused of domestic sexual abuse are housed.
Last March, prosecutor Pecorelli and assistant prosecutor Sánchez were in charge of an investigation with similar characteristics where a suspect was discovered who He organized meetings in a house in Palermo where “clients” who paid $300 or transferred cryptocurrencies abused young women with whom he, under deception, had a relationship..
The procedure was called Operation Focus 69. “An emergency raid was carried out because, after investigative tasks, it was determined that the suspect was preparing a new meeting where the victim was going to be abused by men who had already paid,” said a source with access to the file.
The police and judicial detectives, based on the evidence gathered during ten months of investigation, were able to reconstruct that the encounters where the victims were sexually abused by three or more men took place in a house with a pool located in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo, but they could not determine the exact location.
“The suspect promoted the sexual encounters he organized through closed Telegram groups. We have evidence that he charged $300 and also that he received cryptocurrencies in exchange. The dates he called ‘parties’ were filmed by himself and were later distributed on different platforms,” he explained to THE NATION a judicial source.
One of the victims began being abused when she was 17 years old. Another when he was 20. “When they were no longer useful, he discarded them and looked for other young women. They were vulnerable people. It all started as a romantic relationship until he broke them,” stated the sources consulted.
The research involved Department of Crimes Related to Human Trafficking, Child Pornography and Grooming, in charge of the undersecretary Eleonora Weingast, dependent on the Criminal Policy Secretariat of the Buenos Aires Attorney General’s Officeled by Francisco Pont Verges.
