Louisiana- from www.dailyworld.com – Four persons were arrested late Tuesday when the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office, assisted by the Opelousas Police Department, conducted raids on three Opelousas businesses suspected of selling pornography to minors. The raids were the result of a two-week investigation.
Arrested were Fakher Fakhri Asfour, Ali Kassem Maklani, Qaid Ahmed Alhalmi and Asaad Saleh Zamzami. All are facing charges of sale, exhibition or distribution of material harmful to minors, obscenity and prohibited acts, and consisting of possession of drug paraphernalia.
The Sheriff’s Office had earlier received information that pornographic videos were being sold to minors at the three convenience stores.
Officials executed search and arrest warrants at the Fast Way Food Mart at 708 E. Vine St., the Fina Station at 704 Creswell Lane and the Airport Quick Stop, 818 La. 749.
Guidroz referred to the operation as a “joint recovery,” although it had not been a joint investigation, he said.
The raids went smoothly and without incident. Suspects from all three locations had been rounded up in about an hour.
At each location, as neighbors gathered in nearby yards to watch, sheriff’s deputies and city police officers — some carrying automatic weapons, some masked to protect their identities — secured the premises and began collecting evidence.
Inside the cramped interior of the Fast Way Food Mart on Vine Street, Sheriff Bobby Guidroz told a man being taken into custody, “Not in this parish. Not in this city.”
Possessing and distributing pornographic material is illegal in St. Landry Parish, Guidroz explained, “by parish ordinance and by state law.” Distributing the material to minors is a more serious offense.
Guidroz and Police Chief Perry Gallow were present for all three raids.
At the Airport Quick Stop, a man sat handcuffed in a chair, saying that he did not know it was illegal to sell the materials and insisted he had sold only to three people, none of whom were minors, he said.
The man said he had begun selling the pornographic DVDs for $6.99 each about two months ago when “a guy came with a van” and sold them to him.
Drug paraphernalia also was seized at the businesses.
A search behind the counters of at least two of the locations yielded the components of what officers called a “brown-bag special” — small, ostensibly decorative, glass tube with an artificial rose inside, a metal kitchen scrubber and a cigarette lighter, all packaged in a small brown paper bag and sold for $5 as a makeshift crack pipe.