Black Country mobile phone paedophile ring smashed

Jun 28 2009 by Mark Cowan, Sunday Mercury

A MIDLAND paedophile ring that traded in sickening child sex images via mobile phones has been smashed by cops – after the ringleader accidentally left his handset in a pub.

An investigation was started after cops discovered the Samsung phone, found at an Oldbury social club, was full of pictures and videos of child abuse.

Officers on the frontline of the war against paedophiles spent months painstakingly analysing the data on the phone to identify offenders.

The man at the centre of the ring, Philip Lunn, has already been jailed.

On Friday, another member, Brian Raymond Lowe, was banned from working with children indefinitely and ordered into treatment. A third man, Kevin Norris, was remanded in custody at Wolverhampton Crown Court to be sentenced at a later date.

Dismantling the paedophile ring was the second success this month for detectives on West Midlands Police’s Child Exploitation Investigation Team.

Last week, it emerged that officers helped in the arrest of an American woman who was allegedly using a webcam to broadcast the live sexual assault of a young child, following the detention of a Walsall man on child porn offences.

The investigation into the mobile phone paedophile ring was launched in April last year when police in Wednesbury were handed a mobile phone that had been found in a social club. The handset screensaver was found to be an indecent image of a child.

As officers delved deeper, they found the phone had many movies of children being sexually abused. There were also dozens of daily text messages between members of the ring, wanting to trade images and films and share fantasies.

The phone was eventually linked to Philip Paul Lunn, a single man who lived with his mum in Oldbury, and in June last year police swooped to arrest Lunn and a number of other people they had linked to him through the contacts on his phone.

Detective Inspector Heather McCamley said: “A lot of people with a sexual interest in children will store the images. Such was their thirst for this material that they were willing to delete parts of their prized collection from the phone’s memory to accept new ones.

“This was a lengthy operation that was very demanding on the team, but the overwhelming feeling is one of a job well done, in which we have caught a number of dangerous offenders.”