Police arrest 14 in child porn ring

Australian Federal Police (AFP) have raided properties in Victoria, NSW, Queensland and the ACT with one of the men arrested allegedly in possession of images and videos that would have required 24 standard laptops to store.

The original discovery of the child porn ring came in Germany, with a tip-off from Interpol alerting the AFP to the alleged involvement of Australians.

"With the execution of our final two search warrants this morning that has resulted in one further arrest," the AFP's head of cybercrime operation Glen McEwen told reporters in Melbourne on Friday.

"So for this particular investigation we are now up to 14 offenders. There is another person assisting the AFP with their inquiries." Commander McEwen couldn't confirm where the images and video that had been seized was originally shot.

He also didn't know if any Australian children were involved but said various ethnicities were represented in the material.

The 14 men are facing federal charges in relation to accessing and making available child exploitation material as well as state-based possession of child pornography charges.

The covert AFP investigation was codenamed Operation Belfort. It targeted a number of Australians allegedly accessing, downloading and possessing child abuse images over a file-sharing network.

Police began investigating the group in late 2011 and during the past week executed search warrants across Australia, seizing computers, hard drives, laptop computers, portable storage devices and mobile phones.

Federal Justice Minister Jason Clare said the 14 arrests represented a important breakthrough "smashing an alleged child exploitation ring and taking hundreds of thousands of child exploitation images and videos out of circulation".

"The work the AFP are doing to protect our children against predators who seek to harm them is tough and I congratulate them on the work they are doing," he said in a statement.