Man sentenced to 7 years in prison in country’s first-ever child porn conviction

LAHORE: A court on Thursday sentenced a man from Sargodha to seven years in prison and handed him Rs1.2 million fine after finding him guilty of child pornography – the first-ever conviction in a child pornography case in Pakistan.

A judicial magistrate in Lahore found the convict, Saadat Amin, guilty of belonging to a wider child pornography racket.

He was arrested from Sargodha by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) officials, who found more than 650,000 child pornography videos in his possession.

According to FIA Cyber Crime Assistant Director Asif Iqbal, who led the investigation, the convict confessed to being a part of a child pornography racket during interrogation.

In 2016, Pakistan criminalised child pornography in a historic first, making the offense punishable by seven years in prison and a fine of Rs0.7 million. The new amendment, titled Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill 2015, also criminalised child trafficking within the country.

The initiative came after the country was rocked by a major pedophilia scandal in August 2015, when it was revealed that hundreds of pornographic videos of children from Hussain Khanwala village in the Punjab province had been made and were being circulated.