A 21-year-old man is on trial in Hamburg, accused of committing several crimes online, including forcing a 13-year-old to die by suicide over the internet.
The man, who used the pseudonym White Tiger, is believed to be a prominent figure in a group of international cyber-criminals known as “764”.
He is accused of soliciting children and young teenagers between the ages of 11 and 15 to commit acts of violence against themselves online.
Authorities said White Tiger’s victims were from Germany, the UK, Canada and the US but his lawyer described the allegations as baseless and fabricated.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has described the “764” group as an international child exploitation business and a “network of nihilistic violent extremists”. It also made several arrests.
The man, named only as Shahriar J in accordance with German privacy laws, has German and Iranian nationality. He was arrested at his parents’ home in Hamburg last summer.
He was charged with 204 offenses against more than 30 children and teenagers.
Prosecutors in Hamburg say the crimes were committed between 2021 and 2023.
Shahriar J is suspected of making vulnerable children emotionally dependent on him through social media. It is believed that he took advantage of that bond to make child pornography.
In some cases, he was accused of persuading his victims to take their own lives.
Prosecutors charged him with one murder and five attempted murders, “as an indirect perpetrator.”
All his crimes were allegedly committed over the internet.
German media reports say that 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 also allegedly tried to take her own life.
According to the charge sheet, to fulfill Shahriar J’s demands for more violent content, children seriously injured themselves or performed sexual acts on themselves in live chats in front of viewers.
The defendant is accused of making recordings of this to threaten the children with publication if they do not cause severe self-harm to themselves in front of the camera.
Because some of the alleged offenses were committed when Shahriar J was a teenager, the trial was held behind closed doors.
Before the trial began, the 21-year-old defense lawyer, Christiane Yüksel, dismissed the allegations as baseless and fabricated. He described the prosecution’s claim of double indirect perpetration in the murder case as “experimental”.
“This construction of so-called indirect performance, as the word suggests, is a construction that is factually incorrect and unverifiable,” he said.