A man from Dublin who was in possession of more than 8.5million images of child abuse on the dark web has been sentenced to 27 years in prison.
Eric Eoin Marques is a 36-year-old Irish and US citizen. He was detained in Ireland in 2013, and then extradited six years later to the US.
Prosecutors claim that the 36-year old created and ran dark web servers for five years, 2008 to 2013. This allowed users to access anonymously millions of images and videos showing the torture and rape of children.
US District Judge Theodore Chuang said Marques’s conduct was no different to that of a drug lord, the Independent reports.
The US justice department said that nearly 2 million of those images and videos “involved victims that were not previously known by law enforcement”.
“Many of these images involved sadistic abuse of infants and toddlers to include bondage, bestiality and humiliation to include urination, defecation and vomit,” the department explained.
Marques asked the judge to sentence him instead to 21 years, since he had previously served eight years in the US and Ireland. But this was turned down.
After he finishes his sentence at the US federal prison, Marques will be eligible to return home to Dublin.
A court filing revealed that investigators identified Marques as one of the most prolific global purveyors of child abuse photos and that he made $3.6 million from these activities.
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His lawyers stated that his earnings came from legitimate web hosting services and not the dark web.
US attorney Jonathan Lenzner said Marques had caused “unspeakable damage” to children, some of whom were physically assaulted for the purposes of image sharing.
He was sentenced to eight years in prison and ordered to pay $87,000 for victims of images he distributed.
Lenzner added: “This is the first case that I’m aware of where we went to the seeds of the trade, the main engine driving so much of the illegal child pornography trade globally.”