_________________________________________________________________ March 17, 2011 More Arrests Likely in Pedophile Raid By KATRIN BENNHOLD PARIS -- When international police teams revealed this week what they described as the biggest online pedophile network uncovered so far, the numbers were staggering: 670 suspects, 230 rescued children and 184 arrests across 30 countries. But on Thursday investigators said that hundreds of further arrests may yet follow. "This is a huge network, the biggest that we've seen in terms of the scale, in terms of the number of children safeguarded, in terms of the number of people identified," Rob Wainwright, director of Europol, the European Union police agency, said by telephone. He said more arrests were likely. Details of the ring came out Wednesday when Amir Ish-Hurwitz, a 37-year-old Dutch resident whom investigators identified as the founder and owner of the boylover.net Internet forum, was jailed by a court in The Hague. Based on forensic evidence gathered from the Web site's server, Europol has sent 4,200 intelligence reports to the authorities across the world over the past 12 months, Mr. Wainwright said, each one centered around a potential pedophile suspect now on the radar of the local police. In some cases the police have not had the opportunity to arrest suspects, perhaps because their whereabouts are unknown, he said. Some arrests are deliberately postponed for operational reasons, because investigators hope surveillance may reveal links to other abuse networks. In one sign of how interconnected the murky world of pedophile rings is, 180 of the Europol reports were connected to other child abuse investigations the agency had in its database, Mr. Wainwright said. Operation Rescue began three years ago when Britain's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center and the Austrian Federal Police independently identified boylover.net as an important meeting point for child abusers. Since then, teams from Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand have joined the investigation. On the Web site, a legal "discussion only" forum which at its height had some 70,000 followers, people shared confidences about their sexual interest in boys. Among the evidence made public by Europol this week were lewd public postings fantasizing about young boys in diapers and one man's account of how he made an unidentified boy wear diapers between the age of 9 and 13. But as three undercover policemen posing as pedophiles on the site quickly discovered, contributors would then go on to trade illegal images and videos of abused children through private channels like e-mail. Some suspected abusers could be identified as early as 2008, with four early arrests taking place in Thailand that year and several more a year later. But a major breakthrough came in early 2010, when forensic experts at Europol managed to break into the Web site's main server after shutting down the site itself in late 2009, allowing them to identify suspects and track their private communications on a large scale. What they found was a harrowing picture of danger lurking in what are often presumed the safest places. The list of suspects included fathers, police officers, and a karate teacher. At least one of them was a woman and another an 82-year-old man. In one case, a young Spaniard is accused of having abused some 100 children over a five-year period before Europol tipped off the Spanish government and triggered an arrest, an investigator said. In another an 18-year-old boy abused his nephew, only a toddler. Several cases involved fathers sexually abusing their own sons, and an undisclosed number of children have been taken into care as a result. "Many of the people arrested have been in positions of trust," said Hannah Bickers, a spokeswoman of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center. Mr. Wainwright of Europol said it was a stark reminder that reality bore little resemblance to Hollywood cliches of pedophile kidnappers or strangers lurking in dark alleys. "There is no typical profile," he said. "It's a feature of society. There are many child sex offenders out there, and they put themselves in a position of access to children and in a position from which they can manipulate vulnerable children."