13 hours ago
7
Bethany BellBBC News, Berlin
A 21-year-old man has gone on trial in Hamburg, charged with committing multiple crimes online, including coercing a 13-year-old to die by suicide on the internet.
The man, who used the pseudonym White Tiger, is believed to have been a prominent figure in a group of international cyber-criminals known as "764".
He is accused of grooming children and young teenagers between the ages of 11 and 15 to commit acts of violence against themselves online.
The authorities say White Tiger's victims came from Germany, the UK, Canada and the US but his lawyer described the allegations are baseless and fabricated.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) described the "764" group as an international child exploitation enterprise and a "network of nihilistic violent extremists". It also made a number of arrests.
The man, named only as Shahriar J in line with German privacy laws, has both German and Iranian nationality. He was arrested at his parents' home in Hamburg last summer.
He is charged with 204 offences against more than 30 children and teenagers.
Prosecutors in Hamburg say the crimes were committed between 2021 and 2023.
Shahriar J is suspected of having made particularly vulnerable children emotionally dependent on him via social media. He is then believed to have exploited that bond to create child pornography.
In some of the cases, he is accused of persuading his victims to take their own life.
Prosecutors have charged him with one murder and five attempted murders, "as an indirect perpetrator."
All his crimes are said to have been committed via the internet.
Reports in the German media say one of his victims, a 13-year-old boy from the US, took his own life in real time online.
A 14-year-old Canadian girl is alleged to have attempted to take her own life too.
According to the charge sheet, in order to comply with Shahriar J's demands for increasingly violent content, the children seriously injured themselves or performed sexual acts on themselves in live chats in front of viewers.
The defendant is accused of having made recordings of this in order to threaten the children with publication if they did not inflict even more serious self-harm on themselves in front of the camera.
Because some of the alleged offences were committed when Shahriar J was a teenager himself, the trial is taking place behind closed doors.
Before the trial began, the 21-year-old's defence lawyer, Christiane Yüksel, rejected the allegations as baseless and fabricated. She described the prosecution's claim of double indirect perpetration in the murder charge as "experimental".
"This construct of so-called indirect perpetration is, as the word suggests, a construct that is factually incorrect and cannot be proven," she said.
