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Danish man on trial for ordering sexual abuse of 346 children

The Local Denmark
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Danish man on trial for ordering sexual abuse of 346 children
The case is being held at a court in the Danish suburb of Glostrup. Photo: Scanpix

A 70-year-old man went on trial in Copenhagen on Tuesday accused of ordering the rape or sexual abuse of 346 Filipino children.

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The pensioner from Brøndby, on the outskirts of Copenhagen, stands accused of ordering and paying for child sex shows in the Philippines remotely, viewing them live over a video link. 
 
Prosecutor Helene Brædder from the Vestegnens police said that the case was extremely serious “because that is a case of live-streamed child rape, which was strung out over five years”. 
 
The accused remained silent throughout the first day in court, apart from occasional whispered exchanges with his lawyer, but is expected to deny the most serious charges when he takes to the stand on Wednesday. 
 
“It has emerged that the defendant acknowledges that he has watched these actions being live-streamed,” said Trine Maria Ilsøe, the legal correspondent for state broadcaster DR.  “He also recognises that in some cases they were young people under the age of 18. On the other hand, he refuses that they were under 12, or that there have been any rapes.” 
 
The prosecution's case is expected to rely heavily on the chat conversations the man had with the people organising the filming in The Philippines. It has submitted six binders containing transcripts of chat conversations carried out on Facebook and Skype. Together, the court received 4,708 documents.
 
At Tuesday’s hearing the prosecution read through the charge document and called two witnesses, an IT specialist from the National Cyber ​​Crime Centre, and an expert from Interpol who explained the phenomenon of live-streamed child rape. 
 
Brian Lewis, a British pensioner, was last November jailed for four years for ordering the sexual abuse of children as young as four in the Philippines. 
 

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