VIENNA, (Reuters):

Austria has smashed a global child pornography ring involving 2,361 suspects in 77 states who paid for Internet videos showing children subjected to "the worst kind of sexual abuse", officials said yesterday.

Officials said 607 of the suspects were in the United States, 466 in Germany, 114 in France and 23 in Austria. But hits on a Russian web page that offered the videos were recorded in countries ranging from Algeria to Iceland and Venezuela.

Most of the 2,361 people under investigation were suspected of distributing the digital videos after watching them, Interior Minister Guenther Platter told a news conference.

Eight videos downloaded from the Internet site, which has been shut down by investigators, displayed "the worst kind of sexual abuse of children", Platter said, adding that the youngest victimised girl was five years old.

Evidence seized

Austrian police had seized 31 desktop computers, seven laptops, 23 hard disks and other storage devices, 1,232 DVDs, 1,428 diskettes and 213 video-cassettes in raids.

Platter said 14 of the 23 Austrian suspects had confessed to downloading the material. They included students, government employees and retired people, and ranged in age from 17 to 69.

None of the suspects had been arrested, but Austrian police were pooling findings with law-enforcement counterparts in other countries in hopes of bringing about prosecutions.

Harald Gremel, an Austrian police expert on Internet crime overseeing the investigation, said the case arose last July when the operator of a Vienna-based Internet firm notified police that hackers had uploaded suspicious material onto its server.

The videos were accessible via a link to a Russian Web site that offered them for downloading. In a 24-hour period, police recorded more than 8,000 hits from 2,361 computer addresses.

Gremel said investigators believed the videos were produced in eastern Europe and uploaded to the site from Britain.