German sentenced for plan to abuse, torture boy
June 30, 2018
A German man who planned to rape and torture a 9-year-old boy was sentenced to eight years in jail on Friday in the latest verdict linked to a busted pedophile ring in the southwestern German town of Staufen.
The 44-year-old man from the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein contacted the male partner of the boy's mother over the darknet ― a mainly anonymous and hidden part of the internet accessible only with special software ― and asked him if he could sexually abuse and kill the boy.
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The partner, who along with the boy's mother is on trial for sexually abusing the boy and offering him for sex online, declined the request.
Unaware that the mother and her partner had been detained, the man contacted the couple again in September 2017. Police set up a fake meeting in Karlsruhe and arrested him at the beginning of the year, when he showed up with handcuffs, duct tape and a gagging cloth.
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The defendant had previous run-ins with authorities. In 2010, a court sentenced him to 11 years in jail for speaking with a Swiss man about sexual abuse and murder and offering to exchange his son with the Swiss man's on an online forum. A higher court overturned the decision and he was released in 2015.
The man is one of eight defendants on trial for crimes linked to the pedophile ring set up by the 9-year-old boy's mother and her partner.
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A 41-year-old German man was given a 10-year prison sentence for rape and severe sexual abuse in April, and a 50-year-old soldier in the German army was sentenced to eight years in jail in May for raping the boy and distributing self-filmed pornographic material on the internet.
The verdict against a 37-year-old Swiss citizen, who confessed in early June to sexually abusing the boy, is set for next week.
amp/sms (dpa, AFP)
Editor's note: Deutsche Welle follows the German press code, which stresses the importance of protecting the privacy of suspected criminals or victims and obliges us to refrain from revealing full names in such cases.