Paedophile caught in act, live on Internet

Ottawa - A 34-year-old Canadian man was arrested hours after he sent live web-images of himself sexually abusing a pre-school girl this week to a shocked undercover officer, police said Thursday.

"The officer was in conversations with the accused at the time," Detective Constable Paul Krawczyk, a Toronto police officer who witnessed the violent abuse, told reporters.

"I can't get into details of what exactly happened but certain things in the images and in the chat with the person, it was obvious that it was happening live ... We saw live abuse happening."

Krawczyk said the Toronto child exploitation unit had struck up an online conversation with the suspect, when he sent the undercover officer images of himself sexually assaulting a girl "in the moments following the assault."

Within two hours, police tracked him down and arrested him on Sunday at his home in St Thomas, about 200km south-west of Toronto, where the abuse is alleged to have occurred.

Police charged the man with 11 child pornography-related offences. He was expected to appear in court Thursday, but his identity was not released to protect the girl, who is now safe with family members, police said.

"You think you see everything, or you think you can deal with everything, but at that moment, what I recall is my heart racing out of control, sweating, and feeling like I was going to throw up, to be honest," Krawczyk said.

"Unfortunately we see a lot of (these images) many times a day even. But to see this child and look in that child's eyes and realise that that child was live somewhere and that we had the possibility to save her right then, it's difficult to describe."

"The minute we realised what was happening, we went as fast as we could." - Sapa-AFP

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