Man arrested for ‘upskirting’ over 500 women

MADRID: Spanish police said Wednesday they have arrested a man suspected of secretly recording videos of the underwear of over 500 women, some of them minors, on public transit and supermarkets.

The man allegedly used a mobile phone concealed inside a backpack which he placed on the ground to take pictures up women´s skirts in Madrid without their consent, a practice known as "upskirting", police said in a statement. He then uploaded at least 283 of these videos to a pornographic site where they were viewed over a million times.

Police arrested the 53-year-old Colombian national while he was in the act of recording up the dress of a woman on the Madrid metro using a "strategically placed mobile phone" in his backpack, the statement said.

He "acted in a compulsive way, daily, recording all the women that he could," it added. During one five-day period he recorded 29 different women, police said. The man operated in the metro and commuter trains and "in some cases followed some of the women from the metro to supermarkets to continue recording them," Rafael Fernandez of the cybercrime unit of Spain´s national police told reporters.