Islamabad: A Pakistan court has sentenced a man to seven years in jail and fined him Rs 1.2 million in the country’s first-ever conviction for child pornography.
Sadat Amin was found guilty by the court in Lahore on Thursday of being part of a global child pornography racket spread across Sweden, Italy, the US and the UK, the Pakistani media reported.
He was arrested in April 2017 by the Federal Investigation Agency from Pakistan’s Sargodha city and over 650,000 pictures and videos related to child pornography were seized from his possession, the Express Tribune reported.
Pakistan criminalised child pornography in 2016, making the offence punishable with seven years in prison and a hefty fine. The new amendment, titled Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill 2015, also criminalised child trafficking within the country.
The country was rocked by a major paedophilia scandal in August 2015, when it was revealed that hundreds of pornographic videos of children from Hussain Khanwala village in Punjab province had been made and were being circulated.
—IANS