A 44-year-old man from Cincinnati has been sentenced to five years in federal prison after he was found guilty of possessing horrific images and videos of young girls being sexually abused after Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at Boston Logan Airport found the material by chance.
Thiago da Silva Pinheiro had just flown into Boston on a commercial flight from Toronto, Canada, on September 20, 2022, but he was only meant to be transiting through Logan to get on a connecting international flight to Brazil.
As Pinheiro was passing through the customs point to go and recheck his bags for his connecting flight, CBP officers pulled him aside for a random inspection and started going through his baggage.
It was during this secondary screening that officers found a Samsung tablet in his luggage and started to manually review what was on it. To their horror, they found shocking child sexual abuse material in the tablet’s photo gallery.
Pinheiro, who had previously worked as a teacher in Brazil, initially told the officers that he had bought the tablet from a friend and had never bothered to have the device wiped of its previous contents.
But during an interview with officers from Homeland Security’s specialist Child Exploitation and Computer Forensics Group, Pinheiro later admitted that the tablet had been wiped prior to him buying it and that he was the only person with access to the device.
Pinheiro also initially denied any knowledge of child sexual abuse material being on the tablet but then admitted that he had obtained the images and videos from an online file-sharing service on the dark web that is used by child molesters.
A forensic examination of the tablet revealed that there were 2,800 videos on the device, and the vast majority were of child pornography.
Earlier this year, Pinheiro pleaded guilty to one count of possession of child pornography, and he was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton last week. Pinheiro will also face five years of supervised release once he gets out of jail.
In August, it was revealed how the Department of Homeland Security allowed a man whose checked-in luggage tested positive for a highly sensitive and dangerous homemade explosive at Boston Logan International Airport to get on an international flight to Paris.
Aram Brunson from Newton, Massachusetts, is a US citizen of Armenian descent, and federal officials now believe that he has formed a desire to undertake militant action against Azerbaijanis and others who pose a threat to ethnic Armenians living in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
An investigation into Brunson’s suspected links with terrorism was underway in August 2023 when he went to board a flight from Boston Logan to Paris. During a random security check, TSA officers swabbed the exterior of Brunson’s checked luggage, which came back positive for HMTD – a volatile homemade explosive.
Brunson was stopped by Homeland Security, but he claimed that he had never handled explosive materials and had no idea why the swabs would have alerted for HMTD.
He was allowed to board his flight to Paris, and he is now believed to be in Armenia. Federal officials have tried to convince Brunson to voluntarily return to the United States, but earlier this year, he was charged in his absence with falsifying, concealing, and covering up a material fact by trick, scheme, or device and making false statements to federal officials.
