A 34-year-old doctor has been sentenced to indefinite custody by the District Court of Hillerød in Denmark after committing sexual assaults on his two young daughters. He filmed the abuses and shared the material within an international pedophile network. The assaults took place from spring 2022 to autumn of the same year, with both girls being very young— the youngest being just one week old during the first incident.

According to the court, the father exploited his medical knowledge to sedate the older girl with tranquilizers such as Stesolid before the assaults, which included actions performed on a changing table. The recorded abuses were shared in a network known as “Tarantula,” named after the tarantula spider, which also has members in countries such as the USA, the UK, Australia, and France.

The doctor admitted to committing the assaults but denied the charges of rape. Presiding Judge Ulla Tange Christensen read the grounds for the verdict, in which she and the two lay judges found the doctor guilty of multiple instances of rape or attempts thereof, although in some cases, they agreed that there was no rape involved.

Indefinite custody, the sentence imposed on the doctor, is a decision to confine an individual for an unspecified period due to the danger they pose, which necessitates protection for society. The judges unanimously agreed that a fixed-term sentence was insufficient in this particularly grave case.