German police arrest man suspected of online child abuse after FBI tip-off

By Friederike Heine

BERLIN (Reuters) -A 20-year-old man accused of abusing children with mental health problems on the internet and driving one of them to suicide has been arrested in Germany after a tip-off from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, officials said on Wednesday.

The police chief in the north German city of Hamburg, Falk Schnabel, told a press conference that the more than 120 criminal acts the man was accused of committing laid bare "the unbelievable abyss of sexual abuse that is almost unbearable".

The man is accused of being a leading member of an online exploitation group dubbed 764 that targets vulnerable people, including children, with tactics designed to induce self-harm, police said in a separate statement.

Hamburg authorities launched an investigation against him after the tip-off from the FBI, which was investigating a teen suicide.

The unnamed suspect is accused of forcing children and teenagers to perform sexual acts on themselves in front of a camera and to injure themselves by carving symbols and letters into their skin with knives, according to the police statement.

He later used that footage to blackmail his victims to injure themselves even more severely, which resulted in a 13-year-old boy taking his own life, the police statement said.

(Reporting by Friederike Heine; editing by Matthias Williams and Alex Richardson)