THE Lincolnshire Police-led Operation Alpine scoured 45 countries to uncover more than a thousand suspected paedophiles including police officers, teaching staff and youth workers.

And it was all conducted from a secret unit in a Lincolnshire village where a team of 30 police officers from forces across the East Midlands came together to crack the biggest case they had ever seen of this kind.

Operation Alpine's major incident room.

The thread started in 2006, when Lincolnshire Police arrested IT expert Ian Frost, of Martin Dales, near Woodhall Spa, following intelligence from the German Federal Police.

Frost, 35, and his partner Paul Rowland, 34, were running a server which had the storage capacity of 3.2 million floppy disks.

When police plugged it in to forensically analyse it, it dimmed the lights at the building where it was being examined.

Lincolnshire Police Assistant Chief Constable Roger Bannister said: "That was in 2006 and some months later, we began to realise, not the complexity of it necessarily, but the scale of it.

"It was soon after that we realised we were going to have to investigate this properly and we are going to have to invest in it in terms of time and people."

Mr Bannister went to see Peter Davis, who is the senior officer heading up the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) centre and the Association of Chief Police Officers lead for child abuse investigations. Mr Bannister. said: "We were at a fork in the road thinking do we do this – there is a lot of taxpayers' money in this and we can't afford it.

"But to Peter's credit, he thought it through and said we are going to do it with an expectation that CEOP will help.

"I had to go away and plan how we were going to get help from other police forces

"On average in a murder investigation, you get two to three hundred exhibits. But with this, we were looking at something like four times that – enough exhibits to fill a police station.

"Where were we going to put 30 officers?

"We had to be careful about where we put them because we were going through details of police officers in the UK who were suspects.

"They were breaking the law so we couldn't have it up on a screen in a police station."

A specialised team from London had to check the premises for security and attach metal bars to the outside.

From there, officers combed through millions of indecent child images of all levels up to the most severe.

Mr Bannister said: "The criminality is really interesting because you have got to have money to do this.

"These are people often in employment and they are earning a lot of money so they can afford to do this."

CEOP told the officers that the investigation would bring child protection issues because there was the possibility the 'customers' were abusing their own children, or children they knew.

The investigation has led to 132 children in the UK being protected and safeguarded.

Once Lincolnshire Police and CEOP knew who the suspects were, they created comprehensive intelligence files on each of them.

The files were sent to 50 other forces in the UK and to all the other countries and the intelligence they contained was enough to execute search warrants at their addresses.

This was a new way of working and the template has since been adopted by CEOP in other cases.

Detective Superintendent Paul Gibson, who was running Operation Alpine on a day-to-day basis said: "This job was very technical, but in the background it was about protecting kids and that is the sort of job you join the police force for.

"The information that came off that server was all crunched up and we put it together and realised that there are 45 countries represented in there and every continent other than Antarctica.

"We realised early on the potential for so many countries to be involved.

"We had to go to Washington DC to do some forensic work.

"We liaised with the Americans and Europol.

"We went to the Hague and had to present all of this to the member states too. News services have been tackled before, but not in this much depth we think.

"When you take the fact that we have got UK distributors, that have been convicted and we have those that received it and also child protection angle, when you put that together I would think that's unique in the UK and maybe worldwide."