Shoppers in Australia's second-biggest city stripped supermarket shelves Wednesday as millions in Melbourne prepared for a return to virus lockdown, with warnings the new restrictions will cost the economy Aus$1 billion a week.
https://twitter.com/News24/status/1280815153760686080
Crimes Against Humanity
China is infamous in techniques to torture prisoners & detainees, such as those 5+ million #Uyghur adults and children currently being held in China’s Concentration Camps, prisons & slave factories. This is one.
https://twitter.com/auighur/status/1280821303570767876
Melbourne Australia, 9 Public housing towers, 3k residents forcibly locked in their homes, unable to leave, 500 armed police trapping them inside. Police on every floor. Forced door to door testing/food rationing.
https://twitter.com/angeldemonTV/status/1280942273455370247
Can you see whats happening all around the world?!
Romania Dismantles Third Human Trafficking Ring in Four Days
https://twitter.com/grasshopperxcc/status/1280914870679019521
Romanian prosecutors on Friday announced the dismantling of a human trafficking syndicate that forced young girls into prostitution in the south of the country, in the third such operation against groups dedicated to exploiting women in only four days.
The action came after the US Government’s 2020 Trafficking in Persons Report warned of Romania’s lack of progress in fighting human trafficking and human exploitation. It noted that the authorities had “investigated, prosecuted and convicted fewer traffickers” than last year, and rang alarm bells about the lack of proactive measures taken to prevent human trafficking or protect victims.
A statement on Friday from the prosecution body set up to combat organised crime said: “In this case, it has been established that, between March and July 2020, the members of the criminal group recruited, through the lover-boy method, several minor female victims who were threatened and obliged to practice prostitution in the Giurgiu county and the Bucharest municipality.”
The so-called “lover-boy method” consists of the trafficker luring or grooming the girl into a pretended relationship in order to gain her confidence and draw her into forced prostitution.
Two suspects have been arrested and presented before a court in Giurgiu, near the border with Bulgaria. A judge will decide on the prosecutors’ petition that the alleged traffickers remain in custody for 30 days.
On Tuesday, prosecutors in the Black Sea port city of Constanta arrested and brought to justice eight people who “in the period 2019 to 2020 recruited and housed several minor victims with the aim of exploiting them through forced prostitution”.
Also on Tuesday, the prosecution body specializing in organised crime arrested four other people as part of a group constituted last year that lured poor teenagers into prostitution, all through the lover-boy method. The teens were forced to perform sexual work under threat in various apartments in the town of Petrila, in Hunedoara County, in western Romania.
In a separate case, prosecutors on Thursday said 15 people arrested last year, including three police officers and another state official, will be tried for crimes ranging from child sex trafficking to child pornography and prostitution.
The suspects were arrested after police discovered a clandestine brothel that had been set up in a food factory in Bacau, in northeast Romania.
According to prosecutors, several minors aged between 14 and 17, who often came from poor rural areas, were initiated into the use of cocaine and were sexually exploited on the premises.
Romania, together with Ireland, is the only EU country put in the so-called Tier 2-Watch List of the US Government’s 2020 Trafficking in Persons Report. The other EU countries were classified as Tier 1 or as simply Tier 2.
https://balkaninsight.com/2020/07/03/romania-dismantles-third-human-trafficking-ring-in-four-days/
US TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS REPORT
June 2020 - Final
https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2020-TIP-Report-Complete-062420-FINAL.pdf
MASSIVE INVESTIGATION IN ITALY COMBATING ONLINE CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE
08 July 2020
Press Release
Communications took place through a popular instant messaging application, and they were referred to the police once they were detected by the service owners.
A successful investigation to tackle online child abuse conducted by the Italian State Police (Polizia di Stato) of Turin and supported by Europol, has led to 50 investigations and several searches across the country. Working from referrals through Europol by the Canadian National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre (NCECC), investigators targeted suspects producing, exchanging and possessing child sexual abuse material.
200 investigators involved across Italy
Europol handles the receipt, processing and onward distribution of these intelligence reports from Canada to all of the EU Member States. In this case, the data was sent by Europol in mid-January 2019. The Turin Prosecutor’s Office directed the “Operation 50 Community” investigation which was coordinated by the Italian Postal and Communications Police National Centre for Countering Child Abuse Online (CNCPO) and involved 200 investigators across Italy.
The searches reported by the police led to the arrest of 3 individuals, alongside the seizure of thousands of files. During the course of the investigation, the officers discovered that one of the suspects identified had been previously arrested for sexual abuse of children. Other discoveries included images and videos of sexual violence in which the victims were mainly babies, abuse material involving animals, references to 6 year old children and suspects using abbreviations for pre-teen child abuse.
The Turin Prosecutor’s Office stated that the investigation was long and complex involving the tracing of the nicknames used by the suspects online and finding the suspects behind their activities. A combination of open source investigation and technical analysis was used during the process.
The Acting Head of Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), Fernando Ruiz, said:
Europol’s role in providing a secure means of channelling these reports from Canada to the EU Member States’ police is essential to making sure this valuable intelligence can be investigated and acted on. This operation co-ordinated by our Italian colleagues and directed by the Turin Prosecutor’s Office shows the importance of having a swift international cooperation and dedicated resources to make children safer.
https://twitter.com/grasshopperxcc/status/1280831894154809344
https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/massive-investigation-in-italy-combating-online-child-sexual-abuse
A large-scale mafia raid resulted in the arrests of 45 people in Sicily and one person in the German city of Wolfsburg, Italy's Carabinieri announced on Wednesday.
A joint operation between the Carabinieri, Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and Europol targeted clans of the Cosa Nostra — the Sicilian Mafia — from the towns of Barrafranca and Pietraperzia in Sicily's inland province of Enna.
Police accused an ex-politician of running local mafia operations. He was released on health grounds from a life sentence for mob crimes in 2018 and allegedly immediately resumed his role as a kind of godfather.
He and the others just arrested face charges including mafia association, drug trafficking, extortion, aggravated corruption and illegal arms possession.
Another family member, described as a prominent associate, was arrested in Germany. Police also seized assets worth more than €1 million.
It comes as part of a series of mafia crackdowns in Italy.
German and Islamic State link
In separate mafia raids, Italian police seized 84 million amphetamine pills with possible Islamic State origins that were hidden inside German-origin paper cylinders. Police found 14 tons of pills marked Captagon — a highly addictive amphetamine-based drug that has been widely trafficked by IS — that police said was of Syrian origin.
It is "well known" that Islamic State "finances its activities largely by trafficking synthetic drugs largely produced in Syria, which has become the leading world producer of amphetamines in recent years," Italian police said.
The Guardia di Finanza customs and financial crimes police said they suspected the involvement of the Camorra, the mafia organization that operates in Naples area, of being involved in the drugs, which were intercepted at the port of Salerno.
The Guardia di Finanza said it was likely that European drug traffickers had turned to Syrian suppliers after amphetamine drug production in Europe was largely halted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
And in another bust, Italy's anti-mafia police said on Tuesday they had disrupted a major international drug trafficking ring between Albania and Italy.
Two years of investigations revealed an alleged network of Italian and Albanian operators who smuggled drugs across the Adriatic to the southern Italian region of Puglia. Thirty-seven people were arrested in Tuesday's sting.
https://www.dw.com/en/dozens-arrested-in-anti-mafia-raids-in-italy-germany/a-54015083
https://twitter.com/EllenKoko/status/1280933560908685313