A German juvenile court yesterday started the so-called “White Tiger” trial in which a man is accused of multiple sadistic online crimes, including coercing a 13-year-old to die by suicide.
The defendant, a 21-year-old German-Iranian national living in Hamburg, has been only partially identified as Shahriar J, in line with German privacy rules.
The case shines a spotlight on the dark world of sadistic online exploitation, where predators seek out vulnerable youths and manipulate them to commit acts of self-harm, violence against themselves or animals, or to kill themselves.
Photo: Reuters
Shahriar J is accused of having driven a 13-year-old transgender youth living near Seattle to suicide by hanging in a parking lot in January 2022, which the youth live-streamed.
The accused allegedly used the pseudonym “White Tiger” as part of an online network of abusers known as “764.”
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has labeled the group an international child exploitation enterprise and a “network of nihilistic violent extremists,” and also made a number of arrests.
Shahriar J allegedly victimized more than 30 children in hundreds of cases from January 2021 onwards, when the suspect was 16 years old — the reason he is being tried in a juvenile court behind closed doors.
The “764” network is named after the Texas zip code of its founder, a teenager who was arrested and jailed in 2023, news weekly Der Spiegel and other media have reported.
The forum shared ultra-violent “gore” content and child sexual abuse material, and its members exchanged tips on luring victims into producing sexually explicit and degrading material, and then using it to blackmail them.
“White Tiger” allegedly found vulnerable children and adolescents in online chats or gaming forums, and then developed a bond to groom them.
He is accused of encouraging them to produce pornographic content, and using the material to coerce and extort them, among other allegations.
The suspect was arrested in a police raid on his parents’ home on June 17 last year and has been held in pre-trial detention since.
Authorities said they had identified eight victims aged between 11 and 15 from Germany, the UK, Canada and the US.
Prosecutors have leveled 204 criminal charges against him, including one of murder and five of attempted murder.
The case has sparked horrified reactions and raised tough questions about whether German authorities should have acted far sooner.
Weekly newspaper Die Zeit reported that the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had alerted German authorities in 2021 to a Hamburg-based predator called “White Tiger.”
Police reportedly questioned the suspect at the time, but dropped the case after he admitted to possessing pornographic material on minors.
An FBI investigator said that he had shared the identity of “White Tiger” with German law enforcement more than two years before the suspect’s eventual arrest.
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