Two years after a Plettenberg Bay man made headlines over alleged links to a horrific international baby pornography network, the matter was yet again hit with a delay in the Knysna Regional Court on Friday.
The 38-year-old computer engineer, who cannot be named until he has pleaded, was arrested on January 13, 2015 when international police swooped on his seaside home and allegedly found sections of files containing thousands of images and videos of violent assaults as well as internet addresses of more than 300 other alleged paedophiles.
He was scheduled to appear in the Knysna Regional Court for the case to get underway after a series of issues with formulating the charge sheet, but the matter was postponed to February 7, as the accused was absent. His lawyer Carl Jeppe indicated that his client was ill.
The matter has been plagued by delays and recently came to the brink of being struck off the roll over issues with the charge sheet.
During an appearance in October last year, the court was informed that the office of the Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) instructed that the man be individually charged for each of the 179,000 images relating to the case and that each image would have to be described in the charge sheet. It was estimated that his process could take up to three months.
Jeppe then asked for the matter to be struck off the roll as he believed the State had more than enough time to prepare the charge sheet.
Despite his efforts, a final postponement was however allowed and by November 30, last year, the prosecuting team had managed to make such massive progress with the mammoth task that the matter was postponed again to Friday.
The Plett local was first South African to have been arrested as part of Cloud 9 – an operation by South African and Belgian police responsible for cracking down on a child pornography ring linked to a cyber meeting space for paedophiles whose fetishes seem to be the sexual abuse of babies.
Some of the images found included the torture and murder of babies as young as only a few days old.
– African News Agency (ANA)
