SURREY Police officers featured in a hard-hitting Channel 4 documentary ‘Hunting the Paedophiles’ on Monday.

The documentary followed an investigation by the force’s paedophile online investigation team launched in 2012 when a parent in Surrey expressed concern about their son’s online contact with a person claiming to be a 13-year-old girl from Rome.

The victim had initially been contacted on Blackberry Messenger and after chatting online was encouraged to perform sexual acts via a webcam.

Although claiming to be in Italy, the investigation revealed the accounts being used by the suspects were in fact being accessed in the Middle East.

And as the scale of the offending increased it became apparent that the case which had started in a child’s bedroom in Surrey actually involved many hundreds of children.

The National Crime Agency took over the investigation which ultimately saw four men being sentenced to a total of 20 years behind bars in Bahrain for the sexual abuse of boys in the UK.

Superintendent Chris Edwards, head of public protection at Surrey Police said: “The documentary demonstrates how our officers and staff work to keep the public safe and support victims.

“Surrey Police has a team dedicated to tackling this type of online offending and thanks to the painstaking work of those involved we were able to establish that whoever was behind this was targeting boys on a massive scale across 34 forces and beyond.

“It was clearly a dangerous and prolific group and the sentences ultimately metered out to the four men in Bahrain were welcomed.

“I hope this case shows that no matter where in the world offenders are hiding, we will use all available resources and work with other agencies both in the UK and abroad to help bring them to justice.”

Surrey Police’s paedophile online investigation team is dealing with a sharp increase in workload – over the last three years the amount of work has increased by 850 per cent which equates to six investigations in 2012/13 rising to 57 in 2014/15.

In spite of this rise the team is solving 14 per cent more crimes now than it did three years ago.

The programme itself aims to provide an insight into the workings of the National Crime Agency and ‘Hunting the Paedophiles’ was the first instalment of the documentary, which can be viewed again online at http://www.channel4.com.