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Timothy CoxAccording to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, child pornography is a $20 billion a year industry.

31 children and babies, the youngest being 2 months old, were repeatedly abused live online, have been rescued from homes in the UK and abroad following the biggest international online pedophile ring investigation.

Britain's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre worked for 10 months with police from 35 other countries, including Australia, the United States, and Canada,  to id and rescue the children, who were being abused and filmed live.

Timothy David Martyn Cox, 27, a single man who lived at home in England with his parents, ran the operation from his bedroom.    Cox used the name "Son of God", and ran the "Kids the Light of Our Lives" chatroom, where pedophiles shared live images of children being abused. The alleged British "godfather" of the pedophile ring was arrested and jailed in September 2006.

Gordon McIntosh,33, allegedly took over running the chatroom after Cox's arrest in September, and is awaiting sentencing later this month after pleading guilty to 27 charges. Police said among 392 indecent film files in McIntosh's possession were videos of infants being raped.

Last August, Toronto police identified a Briton as the new chatroom host and tipped off British investigators, who began an undercover operation with  cooperation from Canada, America and Australia. They identified Cox and moved to arrest him at his home in September last year while he was online.

After Cox's arrest, the officers spent 10 days "chatting" with hundreds of pedophiles from across the world, posing as Cox, to gather evidence. Detectives found more than 75,000 indecent and explicit images on the computer in Cox's bedroom and evidence that he had supplied over 11,000 images to chatroom members.

Detective Sergeant Carl Fisher, of Suffolk police, said: "Cox showed no remorse when he was arrested. Our officers spent three months viewing the images and categorising them and they were the worst things we have ever seen."

More than 700 suspects, worldwide, are still being investigated.

Unlike many paedophile rings online, the abuse was carried out in real time and placed live online.