Larger text size Very large text size A Brisbane man who blackmailed a year-old girl into sending an explicit video of herself will be released from prison early, after a Queensland court ruled a year jail term was "crushing and manifestly excessive". Luan Tahiraj was jailed in June for using the internet to try and to procure and year-old girls for sex, as well as for accessing and possessing child pornography and exploitation material.
In a decision handed down late last year, the Supreme Court of Appeal reduced Tahiraj's total sentence to eight years, meaning he will be eligible for parole in Tahiraj was 19 at the time of the offences in and and lived with his mother in their North Lakes family home. Advertisement He convinced the year-old victim, who lived in NSW, to download a program which she believed would increase her "friends" on social media site MySpace.
However the program allowed Tahiraj to hack the girl's computer and remotely control her webcam. In March , Tahiraj befriended a year-old Brisbane girl the same way and asked her for sex, despite being told she was underage.
Australian Federal Police raided Tahiraj's home a month later, seizing his laptop and hard drives. They found explicit images of child porn and abuse, as well as evidence showing that Tahiraj had made a recording of the year-old girl and uploaded it to a file-sharing website.
Before his arrest, police claimed Tahiraj bragged about his actions online, saying: "I'm Rofles, I destroy lives I make a girl cry. I force her to strip and f herself". Despite never meeting either victim, both girls were able to identify Tahiraj when police interviewed them and showed a photo board. Tahiraj denied all the charges, claiming that his computer had been hacked and evidence planted by someone named "Digerati". He also enlisted a computer scientist as a witness at trial, who said it was possible for the hacking theory to be true due to "vulnerabilities" on his laptop.
