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The participation of the Greek service fighting electronic crime within the pan-European police operation ICARUS has been highly productive. The primary purpose of the operation is to fight paedophilia on the Internet.
    
Within the three months-long action, Greek police arrested and sent to court, using the fast-track procedure, nine people from Athens, Piraeus, Arta, Corfu and Heraklion in Crete. Preliminary case files for five people were made in parallel. Police officers conducted dozens of inspections and confiscated large amounts of electronic files containing porn materials with children.

The operation was coordinated by Europol and consisted in conducting electronic investigations. The police managed to track the electronic traces of users, owners of pornographic videos involving children through the eDonkey program for exchange of electronic records. Among the "customers" users from Greece were also found.

The data collected were sent to the chief prosecutor in Athens, who issued the orders for cancelling the confidentiality on communications. Sixteen hard drives and eleven laptops were found and confiscated during the inspections in the houses and workplaces of the suspects. They contained thousands of files of particularly brutal porn content of a total size of over 14,000 GB.

A little later, the police announced the names of the nine persons arrested. They are charged with delivery and possession of child porn materials via the Internet and making porn materials with children and manipulation of minors under the age of 15 years.

The nine persons arrested are: Michail Michailidis from Piraeus, born in 1945 – retired, Christos Doulkeridis from the Athens suburb of Maroussi, born in 1982 – a student, Vassilis Vassiliou from Athens, born in 1961 – a school bus driver, Panagiotis Daniel from Athens, born in 1982 – a private company employee, Apostolos Itsios from Thessaloniki, born in 1977 - a businessman, Theodoros Mustakis from Athens, born in 1959 - a businessman, George Hodrogiannis from Iraklio, born in 1965 - a military aviation officer, Dimitrios Patelis, born in 1973 - unemployed and the Frenchman Tardy Guilher, born in 1947 - a former diplomatic officer. He is also accused of providing false personal information during his capture. A small amount of cannabis was found in the house of one of the Greeks.

At European level 112 peoplehave been captured from 22 countries, the total number of suspects is 269 and new arrests are expected.

The police have urged people who have any information relating to the captured persons and know anything about such cases to go to the service fighting electronic crime.