Thirty-one children have been taken into care after British police smashed an online paedophile ring operating in 35 countries.

More than half of the children, who ranged in age from 18 months to early teens, live in Britain.

The international inquiry, called Operation Chandler, has broken new ground by uncovering evidence that many of the men involved were child abusers and not simply consumers of child pornography.

“No investigation has rescued so many young and vulnerable people from a group of hardcore paedophiles,” said Jim Gamble, the head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), which led the inquiry.

At the centre of the paedophile ring was Timothy Cox, 28, from Buxhall, Suffolk, who ran a chat room entitled “Kids the Light of Our Lives”, from which members of the group could watch children being abused live through video streaming and file-sharing technology.

When he was arrested last September, Cox, who worked for his family’s microbrewing business in Buxhall, had 75,960 indecent images – including footage of serious sexual assaults on children – on his computer. He used the nickname “Son of God” when he was online and another identity, “I do it”, when he was trading indecent images. Evidence was uncovered to show that he had supplied 11,491 images to other users of his site.

The material found on Cox’s computer. which was kept in his bedroom at the large farmhouse that he shared with his parents and sister, included 316 hours of film footage. Three officers from Suffolk police spent three months viewing and categorising the material.

Cox pleaded guilty at Ipswich Crown Court yesterday to nine offences of making and distributing indecent images of children. Charges of inciting child abuse and procuring children for abuse were dropped.

Judge Peter Thompson said that the images on Cox’s computer included very young children “being subjected to sadistic, painful abuse”. Detectives who interviewed him said that he showed no remorse.

Judge Thompson imposed an indefinite jail term on Cox, saying that the Parole Board would review his detention after he had served four years and eight months.

After Cox’s arrest in September, the administration of the chat room was taken over by a group member whose usernames included “silent-blackheart” and “lust4skoolgirls”. Investigations led Ceop to Gordon McIntosh, 32, the manager of a video-streaming company, who lived in a bedsit in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire.

McIntosh is in custody on remand, having pleaded guilty to 29 charges of making, possessing and distributing obscene images. He will be sentenced at Luton Crown Court next week. Detective Sergeant Gez Ellis, of Hertfordshire police, said: “When McIntosh wasn’t asleep he was online in this chat room. This was his life.”

Of the 700 suspects identified worldwide as members of the chat room, 200 live in Britain. Half of those suspects, including teachers and others in positions of trust or with access to children, have already been arrested, charged or convicted. The other 100 are under police investigation.

Among those already in prison is a 32-year-old man from Stockport, Greater Manchester, who was jailed for a minimum of seven years last week after admitting child rape.

Graham Conridge, 60, a music teacher from Bedford, who posed online as a teenage boy to persuade girls to strip and perform indecent acts in front of webcams, was jailed for 32 months in April.

Hundreds of thousands of images of abused children that were recovered during the operation are now being examined by victim identification teams around the world.

Mr Gamble added: “This is not about pornography – this is about child abuse. Let’s call them what they are – a ring of paedophiles who abused children online and shared images of that abuse.”

Mr Gamble said investigations into the chat room’s users were continuing around the world, with arrests in Canada, Australia and America.

Closing the net

— Operation Cathedral 1998: international investigators dismantled the “Wonderland Club”, unearthing 180 suspects. It led to the convictions in Britain of seven men who exchanged 120,000 indecent images of children.

Wonderland was the first international online paedophile gang identified by investigators

— Operation Ore 2000-03: began after US investigators uncovered a network of child pornography sites hosted in Texas and accessed by credit card subscribers around the world.

Thousands of Britons’ credit card details had been used to access the sites and police forces faced a deluge of cases.

The lessons learnt led to the formation of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre

— Operation Wickerman/ Chandler 2005-present: the ongoing inquiry that began in the US and led to Operation Chandler and the arrest of Timothy Cox.

Cox took the name “Son of God” from Royal Raymond Weller of Clarksville, Tennessee, who ran the “kiddypics” abuse website under the name “G.O.D.”, meaning Galactic Overlord Duplicate. Weller pleaded guilty to child abuse offences in 2006

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