On Tuesday in the trial of Aydan Coban for sextortion in the Amanda Todd case, an investigator testified that he found files named “Amanda Todd” on the hard drive seized from the 44-year-old Dutch defendant suspected of being at the origin of the harassment that led to the teenager’s suicide in British Columbia.
In front of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Frank van der Molen, an investigator and computer analyst for the Dutch police, said that one of the files found on the hard drive was linked to a 260-second video and another to a profile. Facebook.
This evidence presented to the jury by Dutch police is the first in three weeks of trial to establish a direct link between Amanda Todd and the electronic devices seized from Aydin Coban during his arrest in 2014.
According to the Dutch investigator, the files named Amanda Todd are part of 1383 video files played on the media player of the suspect’s computer.
Frank van der Molen, however, specifies that no video including Amanda Todd was found on the device, only references to the videos.
The importance of device capture
The Dutch police chief investigator who arrested Aydin Coban in January 2014 continued the testimony he started on Monday. Joerie van Schijndel said it was important to arrest the suspect while he was using his computer so that investigators could access his devices while online.
Upon arrest, an officer immediately went to the suspect’s room to prevent the computer from going into sleep mode.
Photos taken during the inquest were presented to the jury. It shows several devices, including a laptop plugged into an external monitor, a cable plugged into a computer tower, and a wire connected to an antenna perched on a stack of boxes.
An encouraging step
Outside court, Amanda Todd’s mother said she was pleased to finally see evidence presented to the jury that directly links her daughter to the devices seized from Aydin Coban after three weeks of technical presentations.
I feel relieved to know that the police have found concrete evidence that links Amanda’s name to Mr. Coban’s hard drives, she says. I hope more [de preuves semblables] will be presented.
Aydin Coban has pleaded not guilty to charges of extortion, harassment and communicating with a minor to commit a sexual offense as well as two counts of possession of child pornography.
Crown Prosecutor Louise Kenworthy claims 15-year-old Amanda Todd was the victim of a persistent online sextortion campaign from November 2009 to February 2012. The teenager took her own life in October 2012 after posting a video denouncing the sextortion of which she had been the victim.
Radio Canada
Source: Radio-Canada
