EDMONTON – A young girl from Hinton, Alberta has been rescued after being sexually exploited, according to the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Team (ALERT).
“The victim is a four-year-old girl,” explained Sgt. Mike Lokken, of ALERT’s Internet Child Exploitation Unit (ICE).
The Northern Alberta ICE team, with the help of the Edmonton Police Service (EPS) and both Hinton and Fairview RCMP members, arrested a 52-year-old man at a work camp in Worsley, Alberta on December 4th.
Kenneth McKinley has been charged with making, distributing, and accessing child pornography, as well as sexual interference and sexual assault.
ALERT said an investigation began after authorities received information from the RCMP’s National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre in Ottawa concerning child pornography images being uploaded to a website.
“As a result of the information that we received from them, we knew that there was a victim in our area, and we knew that the suspect was potentially in our area,” said Lokken.
“As you can imagine, when you have just a picture of a girl, and you believe that she’s from your area, the urgency in wanting to identify that person, and then also the unknown of not knowing where she’s at…It was good, old-fashioned police work that led to her identification and subsequent charging of the accused.”
ICE investigators believed hands-on abuse was taking place so they fast-tracked the investigation to make an arrest.
“The victim is currently living with her family,” added Lokken, “and (there are) no indications in our investigation that the family was aware.”
Lokken said McKinley is an acquaintance of the victim’s family, but is not related to the four-year-old.
McKinley remains in custody, and was scheduled to appear in Hinton provincial court Wednesday.
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