More than 120 people aged from 17 to 82 have been arrested in Britain as part of a massive global child abuse investigation.
All of Britain’s 43 police forces were involved in Operation Rescue, one of the biggest inquiries ever mounted into paedophiles on the internet.
In Britain 240 suspects were identified which has led to 121 arrests and 33 convictions.
The probe, which has run for more than three years, saw 670 people targeted across the globe.
Investigators have identified and rescued 230 abused children, including 60 in the UK.
Details of the investigation were released today after the Dutch owner of a website at the centre of the inquiry was jailed.
Linchpin Amir Ish-Hurwitz, 37, ran online forum boylover.net which had 70,000 members.
Through it paedophiles splintered off, setting up private links to share sick images and films of child abuse.
One was Lee Palmer, a 21-year-old from Cheshire who was jailed for six years in March 2010. He admitted abusing two boys aged nine and two and possessing more than 60,000 indecent images on his computer.
Details of the inquiry – and the latest arrest in Northamptonshire – were revealed at a press conference in The Hague, headquarters of Europol, which co-ordinated the police crackdown involving forces in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, America and the UK.
The massive inquiry was headed by the UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop). Ceop boss, UK police chief Peter Davies, said: “The scale and success of Operation Rescue has broken new ground.
“Not only is it one of the largest operations of its kind to date, and the biggest we have led, it also demonstrates the impact of international law enforcement agencies working together with one single objective – to safeguard children and bring offenders to justice.”
He added: “What we have shown today is that while these offenders felt anonymous in some way because they were using the internet to communicate, the technology was actually being used against them.
“Everything they did online, everyone they talked to or anything they shared could be, and was, tracked by following the digital footprint.”
Suspects came from every walk of life. There were school teachers, taxi drivers, IT consultants, a karate teacher and scout master John McMurdo, 38, who was jailed for three years in Plymouth for possessing and distributing nearly 2,000 indecent images of children.
Hundreds more of the men using the boylover.net site should expect “a knock on the door at any time” said Ceop senior investigator Kelvin Lay.
The investigation began in 2007, with British and Australian covert police internet teams infiltrating boylover.net to identify paedophiles posing the highest risk to children.