LAHORE - A Judicial magistrate Monday extended till April 21 physical remand of a man into FIA’s custody who appeared as country’s first accused for allegedly making over 600,000 children’ pornographic pictures and videos and selling them to foreign buyers.

Sadaat Amin,45,  shared his story with The Nation, revealing how he became a pornographer and what he had been doing when the FIA took him into custody.

The accused said he stepped into the world of pornography in 2013 when Jan Lindstorm, a Norwegian man, who became his friend through internet asked him to help him search childrens’ modeling videos, download them and send him. Lindstorm, he said, asked him that he would help him get citizenship of Norway if he help him find porn videos of children and send him with modification of local children. He said they established network for sharing videos and then his partner started paying him.

In April 2014, he bought the first album of children-pornography to sell it to the Norwegian and the price of the first album was €250 (euros) which he sold against €300 to Jan Lindstorm, Sadaat said adding that Lindstorn became his trustworthy business-partner at least for the next two years.

He stated that he received graduation degree in Mechanical Engineering from Taxila University but learnt computer hacking by himself through which he used to hack porn websites of different countries.

But all it ended up in Dec 2015 when clash erupted between them over a business deal and he broke the network they had developed for sharing porn videos, he said.

“I broke the network system soon after the clash and started my own setup of designing video gaming,” the suspect states, adding that “Now he was running children gaming videos.”

Amin claimed he left the sale of porn videos and broke the network in Dec 2015 but his Norwegian partner Jan Lindstorm continued it whose arrest in 2016 by Norwegian police finally led the investigation to him. In Nov 2016, Norwegian Embassy wrote a letter to Interior Ministry which marked the investigation to Federal Investigation Agency. The agency started investigation on the basis of material provided by the embassy to trace the suspect.

Originally he belongs to Malakwal of Mandi Bahauddin district but had been living in Corporation Town of Sargodha for last many years where he got a house on rent against Rs 3000 per month. He had one sister and mother at home in Malakwal and his father and a brother died some years ago.

“The truth is that I was making gaming videos and selling them with my foreign partners—mostly I got these videos from different websites of different countries including Bangladesh, Russia and Ukraine by hacking these websites and sometime by paying them,” Sadaat said.

The surprising aspect is that still there was no local complainant against him except the Norwegian Embassy. The suspect claimed that he had left this business and the data recovered by the FIA from his computer was two years old which could easily be verified by Forensic Laboratory.

“Now I make gaming videos and do not sell to the local people. It is the reason that there is no complainant against me except the Norwegian Embassy which became complainant on the information provided by his former partner who wanted to drag him for breaking the network,” Sadaat said.

The FIA claimed that it had traced $35,000 through Western Union’s transactions and still investigation was underway to find out if he had more money. However, Sadaat said he was poor and could not make money through the pornography business he had been running for years. He said he lived at a rented house, and could not marry due to poverty.

Court Appearance

The Officials of the Federal Investigation Agency produced Sadaat Amin before the judicial magistrate, pleading that they wanted further physical remand of the suspect to investigate the matter—the first of its kind in the country’s history. The officials pleaded that they have to recover more CDs and to determine the money he had made through the ‘business of pornography’. They also pleaded that they had issued notices to Western Unions, Money Gram and others to come up if the suspect had used them for transactions.

Judicial Magistrate Farooq accepted their plea and extended physical remand of the suspect with directions to complete the investigation on the next date, April 21.

On April 11, the FIA team headed by Assistant Director (Cyber Crime Wing) Mian Saqib arrested the suspect from a house the suspect had taken on rent in Corporation Town of Sargodha and booked him under Section 109 and 420 of Pakistan Penal Code as well as under Sections 20, 21 and 22 of PECA, 2016.

The agency recovered 600,000 porn videos and pictures from the computer of the suspect. According to FIA, the suspect had been involved in porn video making business since 2007.