Delay in pervert arrests defended

Authorities are adamant it is not too late to catch the dozens of New Zealanders implicated in an international child pornography ring.

Police, Customs and Internal Affairs have come under fire for the time it has taken them to act on a list of names supplied by US Customs last September as part of the international investigation Operation Falcon.

Yesterday, police, the lead agency in the joint operation, said they would not comment further on the case as it was an operational matter.

Australia, who were also given names by the US, swooped in September and October on more than 500 homes. More than 2200 charges have been laid against about 250 people.

The time it has taken New Zealand authorities to act featured in an article in Time magazine this week, which asked if the country had become a "haven for paedophiles".

There has been criticism that the suspects would have got rid of any evidence by now, given the high-profile Australian cases and the recent publicity.

Act MPs Deborah Coddington and Stephen Franks said the New Zealand and Australian operations should have been co-ordinated so suspects would not have had the chance to destroy evidence.

But Police Minister George Hawkins said that was not an issue because people could not get rid of the evidence on their computers.

"If they try to get rid of the hard-drive or clean the hard-drive, we have the ability to forensically retrieve the material."

Department of Internal Affairs spokesman Vince Cholewa, speaking in general terms not specifically about Operation Falcon, said clearing a computer hard-drive was difficult and it was possible to recover files that people had tried to delete or had encrypted.

Mr Cholewa said a recent example was Nelson man Jason Gorman, who was jailed for one year on Tuesday for trading child pornography. (See accompanying story.)

But one question that Mr Hawkins could not answer was what happened when a person simply ditched the entire computer.

"Yeah, that's always a possibility," he said when questioned on National Radio.

Mr Cholewa said it was hard to trace a computer back to someone as you had to prove that person had used it for objectionable purposes.

"It is not enough to show that the material on the computer was objectionable. You also have to show that the person you have charged is the person responsible."