Manila: Information shared by the Philippine police helped a court in the US to send an American national to a US jail for 20 years for buying child pornographic materials from the Philippines and Vietnam.
The Philippine National Police (PNP) in Manila was requested to help in the probe by the office of US’ Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) after the latter received information from the US-based National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children that Ronald Carey Shirley, 64, had subscribed to a pornographic social media site, the US Embassy said.
A US District Court convicted Shirley for sexual exploitation of minors on June 29, said the embassy in a report, adding the American national admitted, after his arrest last February, that he paid for sexually explicit images of young girls from the Philippines and Vietnam on the site.
Agents of HSI’s US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Shirley at the Los Angeles International Airport and stopped his February rendezvous with minor Vietnamese girls whom he met online, the statement said.
“As a result of our partnership with the PNP Anti Cyber-Crime Group, we were able to locate and obtain damaging evidence from the victims that proved Shirley coerced them to send sexually explicit images,” the embassy statement quoted HSI Attache Ransom Avilla as saying.
“Our joint effort resulted in the judge sentencing Shirley to additional years in prison,” said Avilla.
The Philippine government did not give a statement about the arrest of people responsible for the pornographic site that exploit children.
