Worldwide Child-Porn Busts Include Arlington Man

ARLINGTON, VA — An Arlington man is among more than 300 people arrested worldwide in connection with a website that authorities describe as the largest child sexual exploitation operation of its kind ever discovered in terms of the volume of content.

Ammar Atef H. Alahdali, 22, pleaded guilty in the Eastern District of Virginia to receipt of child pornography and was sentenced to serve five years in prison and ordered to pay $3,000 in restitution, according to a release from the U.S. Department of Justice.

The child-porn site, known as "Welcome to Video," was parked on the Darknet, sometimes referred to as the Dark Net, a broad term for portions of the internet purposefully not open to public view.

“Children around the world are safer because of the actions taken by U.S. and foreign law enforcement to prosecute this case and recover funds for victims,” U.S. Attorney Jessie K. Liu said in a press release.

While most arrests occurred last year, the scope and details of the operation have only now become public.

On March 5, 2018, agents from anti-crime agencies including those in the United States, United Kingdom, and Korean National Police in South Korea, arrested the site's operator and seized the server that he used, according to the justice department.

The site was allegedly run by Jong Woo Son of South Korea. He is charged with using a Darknet market that exclusively advertised child sexual exploitation videos available for download by members of the site, the justice department said in its release. The images seized are being analyzed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The server held more than 250,000 different videos, and 45 percent of the videos currently analyzed contain new images that have not been previously known to exist.

In addition to the operator of the site, the justice department announced the arrests of an additional 337 site users residing in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington State and Washington, D.C. as well as the United Kingdom, South Korea, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Czech Republic, Canada, Ireland, Spain, Brazil and Australia.