Hamburg (AFP) – A German juvenile court started the so-called “White Tiger” trial Friday in which a man is accused of multiple sadistic online crimes, including coercing a 13-year-old to take his own life. The 21-year-old German-Iranian defendant was attacked on Thursday by other detainees shouting “White Tiger” while he was being transferred for the trial, his lawyer Christiane Yueksel told reporters outside the courtroom in Hamburg. The defendant has been only partially identified as Shahriar J., in line with German privacy rules.
The case shines a spotlight on the dark world of sadistic online exploitation, where predators seek out vulnerable youths and manipulate them to commit acts of self-harm, violence against themselves or animals, or to kill themselves. Shahriar J. is accused of having driven a 13-year-old transgender youth living near the US city of Seattle to suicide in January 2022, which the youth live-streamed. The accused, a student operating from his parental home in a wealthy Hamburg suburb, allegedly used the pseudonym “White Tiger” as part of an online network of abusers known as “764”. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has labelled the group an international child exploitation enterprise and a “network of nihilistic violent extremists”, and also made a number of arrests.
Shahriar J. allegedly victimised more than 30 children in hundreds of cases from January 2021 onwards, when the suspect was 16 years old — the reason he is being tried in a juvenile court behind closed doors. The “764” network is named after the Texas zip code of its founder, a teenager who was arrested and jailed in 2023, news weekly Der Spiegel and other media have reported. Users of the forum shared ultra-violent “gore” content and child sexual abuse material, as well as exchanging tips on luring victims into producing sexually explicit and degrading material and then using it to blackmail them. Court spokeswoman Marayke Frantzen said that if found guilty, Shahriar J. could face anything from six months to 10 years in a young offenders’ institution. Other investigations against the same online network are ongoing, said Frantzen, adding that the current trial “could serve as a precedent”.
Yueksel said the charges against her client were “experimental” and “not provable”. The user called “White Tiger” allegedly found vulnerable children and adolescents in online chats or gaming forums, then developed a bond to groom them. He is accused of having encouraged them to produce pornographic content, then using that material to coerce and extort them, among other allegations.
The suspect was arrested in a police raid on his parents’ home on June 17, 2025, and he has been held in pre-trial detention since. Authorities said at the time that they had identified eight victims aged between 11 and 15 from Britain, Canada, Germany, and the United States. Prosecutors have levelled 204 criminal charges against him, including one of murder and five of attempted murder.
The case has sparked horrified reactions and raised tough questions about whether the German authorities should have acted sooner. Weekly newspaper Die Zeit reported that the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had alerted German authorities in 2021 to a Hamburg-based predator called “White Tiger”. Police reportedly questioned the suspect at the time, but dropped the case after he admitted to possessing pornographic material on minors. An FBI investigator has told Der Spiegel that he had shared the identity of “White Tiger” with German law enforcement in February 2023, more than two years before the suspect’s eventual arrest.
The city-state of Hamburg has blamed the time-consuming task of searching through the “large number of data storage devices” seized and the fact that the victims and other perpetrators “mostly live abroad and have sometimes concealed their identities”. The Hamburg regional court has scheduled an initial 82 days of hearings until December 17, 2026.
© 2024 AFP
