<p>French police have arrested about 60 people suspected of downloading, consulting and sharing thousands of child pornography photos and videos online, a senior official told AFP on Thursday.</p>.<p>The suspects, aged 28 to 75, were netted in a vast, nationwide operation that started Monday and include four people also suspected of child rape, according to Eric Berot, head of the police's OCRVP office responsible for investigating paedophilia.</p>.<p>"This goes to show that downloading child pornography is not trivial," said Berot, adding that "some people act out" what they see in such images.</p>.<p>Among the suspects are a football coach, an imam, an IT specialist, a retired teacher and several unemployed people. Almost all are men, with the sole exception a couple who consulted the images together.</p>.<p>"There is no single profile. People from all social circles are involved," Berot said.</p>.<p>About a dozen among those arrested were known sex offenders.</p>.<p>The police operation targeted almost a third of France's 101 departments and required the deployment of 220 police officers.</p>.<p>The suspects shared images via peer-to-peer networks, allowing them to bypass a central server.</p>.<p>Investigators, aided by software used by the FBI, were able to break into the network, trace the users' IP addresses and monitor their downloads.</p>.<p>Officers seized about a 100 external hard drives, dozens of mobile phones and laptops, some 150 USB keys, as well as DVDs and CDs, containing thousands of photos and videos.</p>.<p>One of the suspects had a water-cooled server with 176 terabytes of downloaded data, Berot said.</p>.<p>Dozens of suspects have been handed over to local prosecutors, and one man, brought straight to court, has already been sentenced to 10 months' imprisonment.</p>
<p>French police have arrested about 60 people suspected of downloading, consulting and sharing thousands of child pornography photos and videos online, a senior official told AFP on Thursday.</p>.<p>The suspects, aged 28 to 75, were netted in a vast, nationwide operation that started Monday and include four people also suspected of child rape, according to Eric Berot, head of the police's OCRVP office responsible for investigating paedophilia.</p>.<p>"This goes to show that downloading child pornography is not trivial," said Berot, adding that "some people act out" what they see in such images.</p>.<p>Among the suspects are a football coach, an imam, an IT specialist, a retired teacher and several unemployed people. Almost all are men, with the sole exception a couple who consulted the images together.</p>.<p>"There is no single profile. People from all social circles are involved," Berot said.</p>.<p>About a dozen among those arrested were known sex offenders.</p>.<p>The police operation targeted almost a third of France's 101 departments and required the deployment of 220 police officers.</p>.<p>The suspects shared images via peer-to-peer networks, allowing them to bypass a central server.</p>.<p>Investigators, aided by software used by the FBI, were able to break into the network, trace the users' IP addresses and monitor their downloads.</p>.<p>Officers seized about a 100 external hard drives, dozens of mobile phones and laptops, some 150 USB keys, as well as DVDs and CDs, containing thousands of photos and videos.</p>.<p>One of the suspects had a water-cooled server with 176 terabytes of downloaded data, Berot said.</p>.<p>Dozens of suspects have been handed over to local prosecutors, and one man, brought straight to court, has already been sentenced to 10 months' imprisonment.</p>