They were merely upholding a comparatively new law preventing the spread of pornographic material, they said. The boy was arrested on Sunday night following a week-long hunt. He had returned to Delhi from a pilgrimage to Nepal with his mother, they added.
"His arrest is key in this case of pornographic images being transmitted to many places. He is the one who started the process of such images being transmitted," Kamal Kant Vyas, additional deputy commissioner of police, told Reuters.
The boy is expected to be charged under the Information Technology Act, passed in 2000, which deals with pornographic materials and their electronic transmission. The images were copied on video and put on Baazee.com for sale. Many people received them on their camera-enabled mobile phones, the deputy commissioner said.
The circulation of the explicit images has sparked concern among parents and teachers about the increasing use of mobile camera phones by students in city schools across India.
Few could have predicted a case like this, though. India is the world's fastest-growing market for mobile phones, with the current 45 million users expected to double in a year.
The police also arrested an engineering student from a top college in eastern India last week, saying he had posted the video clip on Baazee.com.
Yesterday Pawan Duggal, a supreme court lawyer and cyber law expert, told the Times of India that India's new IT law was "full of loopholes."
"I have highlighted these loopholes several times and I believe the government is in the process of plugging them," he said.
Though public transmission and sale of pornography is a crime, possession and viewing is not. Pornographic videos are available in most Indian cities, where there is a flourishing underground trade.
RSS