KEY POINTS:
New Zealand police are tracking potential users of a horrific child porn website following an investigation that identified 700 suspects around the world.
The site "Kids the Light of Our Lives" traded in indecent images of children and showed live child abuse scenes.
Chat-room visitors came from 35
countries, including Canada, the United States, Britain and Australia.
More than 30 children, at least 20 of them British, have been identified and rescued as a result of the 10-month operation to smash the ring.
New Zealand police yesterday confirmed their role in the international bust, saying it was involved in an "on-going investigation" but refused to comment further.
A spokesman for Internal Affairs said the department was not involved.
Ron O'Grady of child protection agency ECPAT said he would not be surprised if New Zealanders were involved in the ring.
"It wouldn't surprise me because New Zealanders are quite heavily involved and in previous [international busts] they've had quite substantial numbers from this country who have been picked up."
Local authorities shared information with international networks "at a very high level" and held details on paedophile rings, Mr O'Grady said.
"The problem is to identify them and catch them at the same time so that they do manage to arrest the people that are behind it all, and also to identify the children, which is a major part of it all."
Four arrests have been made in Australia but police there yesterday said it was "just the tip of the iceberg".
Canadian police said 24 people had been arrested and seven children rescued since late 2005.
US officials declined to comment because their investigation was continuing in at least 12 states, while German police said they were investigating two men in connection with the breakup of the ring.
Website users took part in a "file-sharing" ring in which some paedophiles abused children "live" while being watched and egged on by other gang members via cameras linked through the internet.
Children from as young as two months to "young teens" were seen in the images being subjected to appalling sexual abuse, most of it recent.
British authorities involved in the bust said the severity of the abuse should dispel forever the description of such violent images as "child pornography".
Details of the ring were revealed yesterday following the sentencing of website host Timothy David Martyn Cox, 27, who went by the online alias "Son of God".
He was given an indeterminate prison sentence - where he will remain jailed until authorities determine he was no longer a threat to children - after being convicted of possessing more than 75,000 images of abuse, some involving knives.
Cox was arrested last September after an undercover Canadian policeman found the chat-room during an investigation into paedophile websites.
The information was passed to Britain's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre and specialist investigators infiltrated the site and gathered evidence on members.
Ring members did not pay to see images but were allowed to join because they were trusted - in most cases because they were abusers.
Some of the victims had been abused in films swapped and traded between gang members.
New Zealanders were implicated in another international child porn ring exposed by US authorities two years ago.
The joint police, Customs and Internal Affairs investigation identified 48 New Zealand men who had used credit cards to pay for images of children being abused.
The majority of those identified, who included teachers, a sports coach and businessmen, were charged with importing objectionable images that exploit children and received fines totalling thousands of dollars.
They were tracked from credit card information sent over the internet to pay for the images.
New Zealand internet service providers do not hold information on the sites their customers visit.
Ihug communications manager Annabel Gould said customers' log-on and log-off time was recorded but not the websites they visited.
She said police could request to see emails sent to an customer but needed a warrant and requests were rare.