Den of paedophiles: Kerala couple gets Facebook page using pictures of girls shut down

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At first glance, it was just a Facebook page that appeared to post pictures of children. But “Kochu Sundarikal” was in reality a den of paedophiles, with most people commenting in Malayalam. Every single post had pictures of young girls, mostly school-going tweens and teenagers. Some of the images included a note by the admin, which said: “What would you like to do to her?” While most were pictures that seemed to have been randomly taken from personal Facebook profiles, some were pictures of South Indian actors when they were young. Every image had many comments, almost all of which were of sexual nature. “I am an admin of a Facebook page and we had once discussed the perverse nature of many people online. We got a message from someone alerting us about two Facebook groups. One called ‘Kochu Sundarigal’ and other’ Hot Little Angels’,” says Beena*, who works out of Thiruvananthapuram. She adds: “The content was chilling and it was clearly a meeting point for pedophiles. Some pictures would get hundreds of likes and there were people who would comment on these pictures on a regular basis.” Beena and her husband approached the Kerala police’s Cyber Cell, who asked them to raise a complaint with Facebook. “We did not want to simply block the page; we wanted the people running it caught. Imagine that some parent is uploading the picture of their child and it is being used by someone else,” says Beena. She was initially told by the police that Facebook will not share details of the page admin as it did not technically violate Facebook rules and did not show any nudity. “They were clever to never use any nude pictures, only reason why the page could have survived for quite some time. Kochu Sundarikal in fact had more than 7,000 likes,” she says. Many screenshots saved by the couple showed pictures which got multiple shares, and many vulgar comments. They pursued the case, but were finally told that the page was run by someone from Saudi Arabia and therefore beyond Thiruvananthapuram police’s jurisdiction. “This is not about one or two pages, or simply blocking the pages. I think in cases that we can, it is important to bring these people to the books,”she says. *Beena- name changed Read- Meet the Chennai guy who is dating 365 women this year

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