Man held for Facebook porn page in Tamil Nadu

Chennai: A 27-year-old man from Tirupati, in Andhra Pradesh, was on Sunday arrested by the cyber crime sleuths from the Tamil Nadu police for creating pages for paedophiles lurking on Facebook.

The man has been identified as Yadava Manikanta, a diploma holder, who was running a grocery shop in the temple town.

“He was the administrator of these Facebook pages. He was running three such obscene Facebook community pages for the past three months. Only one community page continued to exist because other pages faced technical failures,” a cyber crime official said.

This is the first arrest made by the Tamil Nadu police after it was revealed last week that several child porn pages in regional languages exist on Facebook. The cyber sleuths are now trying to zero in on other members of the community pages who had also posted vulgar comments under images showing abuse of children.

The accused, Manikanta, is originally from Tamil Nadu but his parents have been in Tirupati for a while now. The police also seized mobile phones and laptops that belonged to the accused.

Following reports of such pages being found, the authorities had registered cases under provisions of the Information Technology Act and POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offence) Act. Technical help from Facebook was provided to help the cops shut down the offensive pages.

The vile pages had created massive uproar in Tamil Nadu. The page administrator had posted several images of young girls being abused with some sourced from the Web while others appeared to have been shot by the administrator himself. Further investigations are on.