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| - A German court on Tuesday sentenced a father to 12 years in jail for sexually abusing his daughter since she was three months old, in a case that led investigators to a massive online paedophile network. Judges at Cologne district court ordered the defendant identified as Joerg L., aged 43, to be placed in preventive detention after completing his sentence, meaning he is unlikely to ever walk free again. Joerg L. was found guilty of dozens of acts of child abuse and rape as well as distributing child pornography, mostly involving his daughter who was born in 2017. He was arrested last October in the city of Bergisch Gladbach in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Police investigating the case were shocked to stumble upon a vast network of paedophiles who abused children and shared images of the crimes in online chat groups and discussion forums, leading to one of Germany's biggest ever child sex abuse probes. The state's justice minister, Peter Beisenbach, announced in June that investigators had come across 30,000 potential suspects connected with the network. A special task force was created to comb through hours of footage and thousands of pictures. Several officers working the case were so traumatised by the images they had to be placed on sick leave. In North Rhine-Westphalia alone, 201 suspects have been identified to date, according to Cologne prosecutors. Germany has been shaken by several serious cases of child abuse in recent years. Eleven people were arrested in June on suspicion of sexually abusing children and filming their actions after videos and photos were seized from the cellar of a 27-year-old man from the city of Muenster, also in North Rhine-Westphalia state. Investigators said they had identified at least three victims, aged five, 10 and 12 years old. In an earlier scandal in Luegde, 125 kilometres (80 miles) from Muenster, several men abused children at a campsite for years. Prosecutors said more than 40 children fell victim to the men between 1998 and 2018, most of them between three and 14 years old at the time. mfp/dlc/pma
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