SOFIA - Three suspects have been arrested in Bulgaria in connection with the killing of an American accused of taking pornographic pictures for a pedophile website, Bulgarian authorities said Sunday.
The body of Daniel Weather, 44, who disappeared 10 days ago, was found Saturday in a ditch about 20 kilometers (12 miles) east of the capital Sofia.
The suspects are three young men, aged 17, 21 and 22, whose pictures were featured on the pornographic site, the secretary-general of the interior ministry, Boiko Borissov, said on Bulgarian television.
Weather, who lived in Bulgaria, was under surveillance by Bulgarian police and American FBI agents for six months "to find ou who ordered the photographs and who paid for the website," Borissov said.
The website's photographs, most of them girls and boys, were taken in five Bulgarian villages. The children were paid 50 lev (25 euros, 33 dollars) for taking part in a photo session.
"The children allowed themselves to be photographed either out of curiosity, or out of poverty," Anton Slavtchev, a psychiatrist, said in an interview on the private television station bTV.
bTV also aired a report about the recruitment of girls in the student quarter of Sofia for photos put on CD-ROMs shipped to the Netherlands. The girls were paid from 300 to 1000 lev.
02/27/2005 20:33 GMT