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A court in Moenchengladbach, western Germany, has sentenced five men to prison for operating a darknet website that enabled hundreds of thousands of users to exchange images and videos of child sexual abuse.
The convicted men, aged between 44 and 63, received prison terms ranging from five and a half to 10 and a half years.
Judges ruled that one of the defendants should remain in preventative detention after completing his sentence due to a strong likelihood of reoffending.
The platform, known as Alice in Wonderland, was taken offline following extensive raids across the country in September 2024.
The trial began in October, and a court spokesman confirmed that the men “largely confessed to the charges.”
Prosecutors stated that the group had acted as moderators or administrators on the site between March 2019 and its closure in September 2024.
Authorities said the website’s primary function was to provide users with illegal child and youth pornographic materials and to facilitate exchanges between members.
One of the men was allegedly responsible for anonymising individuals in videos created by users to hinder potential criminal investigations.
Investigators also discovered evidence that the platform was used to coordinate meetings where children were sexually abused.
The defendants were found in possession of their collections of abusive material, some depicting victims as young as one year old.
Following the raids, officials described the site as one of the longest-running child abuse platforms on the darknet, used to distribute millions of illicit images and videos.
