Vienna, Thursday
AUSTRIAN police have arrested three men on suspicion of sexually abusing children and producing child pornography in what looked like a ``child-for-hire'' network spread across central Europe.
Vice squad officers seized boxes of videos and other pornographic material from the home of one of the suspects at the start of an investigation into the procuring of children, some as young as seven.
The hunt for others connected to the ring could involve neighbouring Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Germany.
``The three men, who are aged between 40 and 51, have been arrested and there appears to be evidence of child abuse,'' a Vienna police spokesman said.
Two of the men are Austrian citizens, one born in Slovakia and the other in the Czech Republic. The third is Polish.
Police declined to comment on whether there was a connection with a Belgian murder and child abuse case which has caused a wave of revulsion across Europe.
Belgian Marc Dutroux, alleged to be the dominant person in a paedophile pornography ring, has been named by police in the Slovak capital, Bratislava, as a suspect in the murder of one Slovak woman and the kidnapping of another.
Tonight Belgian police suspended their dig for bodies at one of Dutroux's houses in Jumet owing to gale conditions. They have found no trace of bodies in more than 22 hours of hunting since Tuesday.
Austrian current affairs magazine News launched an investigative report into the Vienna-based network which provided clients in the Austrian capital with a choice of 70 girls, largely from Slovakia, aged between seven and 13.
Some visited customers in Vienna's top hotels, it said.
Catalogues and videos are sent to clients showing the girls parading like models and a code number for booking them - material which appears not to be illegal in Austria.
An under-cover News team met a ``child trader'' in Bratislava who led them to a city apartment where three girls aged 12 and 13 awaited them.
Vienna police sources said paedophiles made contact by using codes in sex magazines, some of which experts had cracked. Apart from more sophisticated communications through computers, paedophiles were also advertising in magazines to buy and sell ``art objects'', such as a statue of a child, which was understood to mean the procuring of a child for sex.
Meanwhile, Finnish police today arrested two men suspected of sexually abusing a captive 13-year-old girl, but said they did not believe the case was linked to others in Europe.
The men, both Finns aged about 40, were arrested last Saturday in the western town of Tampere in a raid on a luxury boat owned by one of them.
The girl was being held on the boat and had sought help from a passer-by, police chief inspector Ilkka Laasonen said.
``This is an individual case and I don't have any evidence linking the suspects to any other cases,'' he said.-Reuter.
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