Cape Town - An Eastern Cape man tracked by US authorities has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to involvement in child pornography, police said on Friday.
National police spokesperson Lieutenant General Solomon Makgale said: “A Grahamstown man, who was arrested by members of the South African Police Service’s Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences Unit (FCS) from Gauteng in March 2015, has entered into a plea bargain with the State in which he will effectively serve ten years behind bars for his involvement in child pornography.”
“The suspect, Antony Ronald Evans,53, was arrested at his home in Grahamstown in March by the FCS during a joint operation undertaken together with the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr Evans’s criminal activities caught the attention of the US’s law enforcement authorities after seven people were arrested in that country for using specific websites whose core activities were to lure innocent children to engage in pornographic activities.
“When the US law enforcement people conducted further investigation, they established that the websites were being administered from somewhere in South Africa. By then about 600 victims from the United States, whose ages range from 8 to 13, had been exploited.”
According to Makgale, the modus operandi of the users of the websites, of which Evans was a webmaster, was to create false profiles on popular social media websites, pretending to be of the same age bracket as the victim, in order to lure them.
Once they managed to catch the attention of these children, the users would start persuading the young victims to engage in sexually explicit activities and secretly filmed them on a web cam.
During the raid at Evans’s house, the investigation team found 16 hard drives, a laptop, two video cameras and two cameras. He appeared in the Grahamstown Magistrate’s Court in March and was granted bail of R40 000. He then appeared again in April and eventually his trial was transferred to a high court.
“The SAPS welcomes this sentencing as it sends out a strong message, as we approach Child Protection Week, that these acts of criminality will be dealt with in the harshest way possible,” Makgale said.
ANA