IT’S a face that haunts police around the world.

A young girl, probably now nine, who has grown up from infancy on film – thousands of pictures and movies shot of her being molested by an abuser who then shared the images with a network of like-minded internet pedophiles.

As a two-year Queensland-led investigation culminated last weekend with the arrest of 22 people in eight countries, the relief and celebration at busting one of the world’s longest-running and most sophisticated internet pedophile rings was muted by the knowledge that the girl was still out of reach of protection.

Despite the best efforts of Task Force Argos, the Queensland Police Service’s much-lauded child sex unit, and their international counterparts, including the FBI, there are only two things the investigators know about the girl: the country in which she lives and that she is now in real danger.
It is a terrifying truth that yesterday choked up one of Queensland’s most case-hardened policemen.

The Argos chief, Detective Superintendent Peter Crawford, briefly excused himself from his office during an interview when asked about the girl – a “collector’s item” for pedophiles who prize the series that captured her abuse over possibly seven years.

“It is obviously distressing for police to see a young child abused and continued to be abused over a long period of time and not be able to identify or remove them from harm,” he later said.

“Some of these people are collectors, they want a whole series of a particular child growing up, being abused.”

One of Crawford’s inspectors, Jon Rouse, who led the investigation – codenamed Operation Achilles – is blunt about her possible fate.

“The thing is the offender knows we are closing in, we are very worried about her safety,” he said.

Over the next weeks, months and possibly years, police will be analysing more than 400,000 pictures and video files seized in the weekend raids to widen the net on offenders and save more victims.

Already, 40 children – including a four-year-old Brisbane girl – have been rescued through Operation Achilles and its investigatory spin-offs.

The significance of the bust cannot be underestimated.

More than 2500 ‘customers’ in 19 countries of child sex websites have been identified, with 100, including a US reserve police officer and an Australian federal bureaucrat, arrested and charged.

But it is the hardcore network of 22 people, including possibly a few more now under investigation, that is regarded as the coup by investigators around the world.

They were lauded as the untouchables of the international pedophile community.

“They were held-up around the world as the lead players, the ones who could defeat any law enforcement agency, anywhere,” Crawford told The Weekend Australian.

And they were not new to the internet.

While the scope of charges in the various countries have largely been restricted to the past two years, it is believed some have been producing and trading child pornography for a decade – since the explosion of the internet.

The reason they had not been caught, or even detected as a network, was their level of security. To get into the inner sanctum, a member had to go through stages of passwords, highly-sophisticated encryption and codenames. Even the location of their IP servers was disguised. Most, it is believed, didn’t even know the real location or identity of each other.

There was even a guidebook providing the dos and don’ts of avoiding detection and protecting hard drives in the event of a raid. Police had not seen anything like it before.

“What made this group different was the level of security used to protect their identity and restrict membership of the group,” Crawford said.

“They would change their passwords on a regular basis, they would change their encryption keys on a regular basis and use codenames even within the group.”

The level of protection, and years of operating with immunity, allowed them to trade freely and speak openly.

Other, less organised groups often communicate in coded language and trade in parallel, unrelated areas of the internet.

This one didn’t. They boasted among themselves of being able to “defeat” any law enforcement agency in the world.

“This is the greatest group of pedos to ever gather in one place. And I’m honoured just to be a part of it,” one member crowed.

But their seeming invincibility was to be their undoing. It all began to unravel in January 2006 when New Zealand police, who like Argos officers are constantly trawling the internet, came across them.

Police who do this sort of “borderless” work are largely vocational, and don’t worry about jurisdictional rivalries.

They share pretty much everything and often do a lot of each other’s primary investigation because when they initially scope an internet target, they usually don’t know where the person is actually located.

In this case, the NZ police had done enough to recognise there was a group trading in large volumes of child pornography and an Australian may be involved.

Crawford said Argos did a preliminary investigation to establish that it was a job worth doing. “To be honest, we were not sure if we could break through the security, but we wanted to try,” he said.

Crawford is guarded about how it was done, but Argos officers were then able to infiltrate the group.

Argos investigators are empowered to trade child pornographic material, under very strict guidelines, to secure their bonafides with a pedophile ring. In this case, it wasn’t needed.

“We were able to come up with a number of reasons and stories as to why we didn’t – that is our general strategy,” Crawford said.

For the next six months, the Argos officers worked day and night monitoring the group and collecting material. In June 2006 the officers intercepted videos of two girls – aged 9 and 11 – being abused by a man, later found to be their father, somewhere in Europe. The material was sent to Interpol headquarters in France and after more information was provided by Argos, the Belgian abuser was identified and the girls removed.

The trail then led to a professional Italian filmmaker and website creator, who allegedly produced more than 150 made-to-order videos filmed largely in Ukraine. The 42-year-old sold his catalogue – films featuring girls aged nine to 16 – for an average price of $79.

Discovery of the website spawned Operation Koala, named in recognition of its Australian origins and it spread across 19 countries and more than 2500 customers, who paid to download images, were identified and millions of files seized.

In Australia, the Belgian website produced 48 targets and, to date, nine people have been arrested in Queensland alone.

It also led to 24 children being rescued.

One of them was the four-year-old Brisbane girl, whose grandfather had subscribed to the site.

One of the areas of contention between law enforcement agencies around the world is the targeting of subscribers; some forces prefer to target only the big fish, but Argos investigates every single subscriber.

“The difficulty for us is that some people think that a subscriber type of operation is of no value,” Crawford said.

“But any one of those people could be a high level sex offender. When we go to knock on that door, we don’t know what is behind it.”

When police knocked on a subscriber’s door in the outer Brisbane suburb of Kallangur in late 2006, they also found the abuser. The 47-year-old man had convinced his daughter-in-law to return to work on the premise he would babysit his four-year-old grand-daughter. He filmed the abuse and was charged and jailed.

Argos officers were still able to keep their cover inside the secretive network despite publicity surrounding the European website and subsequent string of busts and arrests around the world.

“The filmmaker, his website were just one of many providers for this group, and they just continued on,” Crawford said.

In August 2006 the Argos officer who had infiltrated the group moved to Washington DC to operate from the FBI’s hugely-resourced Innocent Images Unit.

The FBI was stunned that this group – which included 12 Americans – was not only trading in child pornography but generating it.

Many of the victims were children of the offenders. For the next 18 months, the FBI and the undercover Argos officer, as well as another officer sent over to give him support, played the game and collected evidence. They had access to some of the most powerful internet tools on the planet to then track the real locations of most of the members.

In recent weeks they decided they had enough evidence and could go no further without raiding the homes, seizing the computers and then starting the interrogations. The 22 men, some of whom had previous sex offence convictions, were then brought down in simultaneous raids in Australia, the US, Britain, New Zealand and Germany.

“In a lot of cases, these guys were live online on their computers when police went through their doors,” Rouse said.

Among the arrested was an Australian federal government employee, a father of three who is accused of being one of the “key administrators” of the group.

The man, 29, was in charge of vetting new members and monitoring material that was posted within the network. It is believed his children were not victims.

Police won’t talk about the man for fear of jeopardising his prosecution, as well as that of a 50-year-old Victorian man, who is also allegedly part of the group.

Several more members are still in the shadows, including the abuser of the unknown young girl who has appeared in thousands of pictures and videos, and whose image now haunts police officers across the world. Her nationality has not been disclosed in the interests of the operation to rescue her, but police say she is not Australian.

It is a subject that no one likes to discuss.

“There has already been too much said about her, What has happened to her, I can’t bear to talk about,” one officer said.

But Crawford and his team will not give up looking for her. “There is a lot more work to be done, that little girl has not been rescued,” he said.