An Irish-American man described as the world’s biggest facilitator of child pornography has pleaded guilty to running a web server that hosted hundreds of thousands of child abuse videos and images.
Eric Eoin Marques, who was born in New York but moved to Ireland at age 15, is said to have hosted 550 servers in Europe and allegedly ran Freedom Hosting, the infrastructure that allowed sites to operate anonymously – including child-abuse sites such as Lolita City, the Love Zone and PedoEmpire.
These sites, which operated on the darknet, allowed thousands of users to watch and share child pornography, including images and videos of children being tortured and raped, according to court documents presented on Thursday.
His appearance before a judge in the US state of Maryland came after years of fighting extradition to the US, following his arrest in Ireland in 2013 on the basis of a formal request from US authorities.
Marques lost his final appeal in the Irish courts in June 2018 and was extradited to the US where he agreed to enter into a plea agreement under which he admitted to the publication and distribution of child pornography. Under the agreement, the prosecution have recommended a sentence of 15 to 21 years; however, the judge is not required to accept the recommendation and could still impose a sentence upwards of 30 years in prison.
“The defendant’s anonymous web service hosted dozens of insidious criminal communities dedicated to the sexual exploitation of children and disseminated millions of images of that abuse,” said Deputy Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski, of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice
Meanwhile, federal prosecutor Robert K. Hur, of the Maryland district, called it an “atrocious case in which a person facilitated the abuse of more than one million new child victims and tried to keep such abuse hidden in the dark web.”
“We must do everything possible to bring people like Marques to justice in order to keep our children safe,” Hur said.
