Indian Psychiatrist Jailed for 6 Years in UK for Running Child Sex Abuse Website, 7,000 Images Recovered

An Indian psychiatrist has been sentenced to six years in jail for helping run a child sex abuse website.

Dr Kabir Garg, 33, from Lewisham in South-east London, pleaded guilty at Woolwich Crown Court for his role in facilitating the exploitation of children, BBC said in a report.

Garg has been sentenced on June 23 at Woolwich Crown Court, is on the Sex Offenders Register for life. He had acted as a “moderator” of the dark website dedicated to sharing images of abuse, the court had heard.

“Garg was involved in facilitating child sexual abuse on a significant scale. He used the dark web to access a global community of paedophiles sharing and discussing horrific crimes against children,” Adam Priestley, from the National Crime Agency, said in a statement.

He completed his MBBS from Lucknow’s King George Medical University and worked at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) in Bengaluru before moving to UK.

He was arrested in November last year and pleaded guilty to eight charges in January, including the sexual exploitation of children and making and distributing indecent images.

Authorities said that Garg was one of the moderators of the site The Annex, which has 90,000 members worldwide. They found hundreds of links to child abuse material shared daily and Garg was the website’s odd administrators.

“There are hundreds of thousands of members of such sites on the dark web, but few of them are prepared to commit to being a member of staff, which involves dedicating a lot of time for no payment,” Priestley added.

“Officers arrested Garg at his flat in Lewisham in November 2022 as part of a coordinated operation with international partners, at a time when the site was open on his laptop with Garg logged into his moderator account,” UK’s national crime agency said in a statement.

The authorities found over 7,000 indecent images, videos and several medical journal articles which he acquired as a psychiatrist. One of the journal was titled “A Study on Child Abuse India”.

“Garg’s crimes are especially shocking given his understanding of the psychological impact of sexual abuse on children,” Bethany Raine, specialist prosecutor, said.

UK authorities also arrested 34-year-old Matthew Smith from London last year in the same month as Garg was arrested for allegedly being involved in child sexual abuse in India and recovered thousands of images and videos of sexual harassment perpetrated on children from his devices.

Smith allegedly paid Rs 65 lakh to two teenagers in India over five years to sexually assault boys and share images. The authorities suspect that it is part of a larger child porn racket as they discovered thousands of images and videos of sexual abuse.