Sweden's police force this weekend criticised Microsoft for taking way too long to shut down a child porn site hosted by MSN.

MSN Nordic head Lars Backhans was quick to express his disgust at the contents of the site. "It's absolutely awful. We have no tolerance for that kind of content," he told Reuters on Saturday.

Quite right too, but the fact remains that Swedish police notified the company of the offending site on 26 December 2000, but MSN only pulled it from the Web on Friday.

"Each time someone sees [these] pictures, children's rights are violated anew. It is wasteful of Microsoft to take such a long time [to kill the site]," said police commissioner Tony Moork, according to Swedish newswire TT.

Backhans blamed the delay on the holiday period and by the time it takes to locate and save the offending site's web log. Both would be reasonable excuses in any other case, but with a child porn site, we would have expected Microsoft to act with a little more alacrity.

The MSN chief also offered the service's full co-operation with police to help track down the site's creator, though we note that that doesn't include handing over said Web logs, for which Sweden's Finest will have to make an official request, according to Backhans. ®