A 21-year-old man has appeared in court in Hamburg, where he faces charges linked to a series of alleged online crimes, including coercing a 13-year-old child into dying by suicide through internet interactions.
The defendant, who is said to have operated under the online alias White Tiger, is believed by investigators to have been a leading figure within an international cybercrime group known as “764.”
Prosecutors allege that he groomed children and young teenagers aged between 11 and 15, pressuring them into committing acts of violence against themselves during online exchanges.
Authorities say that those allegedly targeted by White Tiger were based in Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. His defence lawyer, however, has rejected the accusations, describing them as baseless and fabricated.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has characterised the “764” group as an international child exploitation operation and referred to it as a “network of nihilistic violent extremists”. The FBI has also said it has made several arrests connected to the group.
In accordance with German privacy laws, the accused has been identified only as Shahriar J. He holds dual German and Iranian citizenship and was arrested last summer at his parents’ home in Hamburg.
Prosecutors say Shahriar J faces 204 charges involving more than 30 children and teenagers. The alleged offences are said to have taken place between 2021 and 2023.
Investigators believe he deliberately targeted emotionally vulnerable children through social media platforms, making them dependent on him over time. Prosecutors say he then exploited that dependency to coerce victims into producing child sexual abuse material.
In a number of cases, he is accused of persuading victims to take their own lives.
The charges include one count of murder and five counts of attempted murder, with prosecutors arguing that Shahriar J acted as an “indirect perpetrator”.
All of the alleged crimes are said to have been committed entirely online.
According to reports in the German media, one of the victims was a 13-year-old boy from the United States who took his own life while being watched live online. A separate case involves a 14-year-old girl from Canada who is alleged to have attempted to take her own life.
The indictment states that, in order to comply with Shahriar J’s escalating demands for increasingly extreme content, children seriously injured themselves or performed sexual acts on themselves during live video chats viewed by others.
Prosecutors allege that the defendant recorded these sessions and used the footage to blackmail the children, threatening to release the material publicly if they did not carry out even more severe acts of self-harm in front of the camera.
Because some of the alleged offences took place when Shahriar J was himself a teenager, the court has ordered that the trial be conducted behind closed doors.
Ahead of the trial, the defendant’s lawyer, Christiane Yüksel, dismissed the accusations as unfounded and fabricated. She criticised the prosecution’s reliance on the concept of double indirect perpetration in the murder charge, describing it as “experimental”.
“This so-called indirect perpetration is, as the term implies, a construct,” she said. “It is factually incorrect and cannot be proven.”
