Townshend escapes child porn charges

Guitar legend Pete Townshend was today cleared of possessing pornographic images of children, but The Who guitarist was given a formal police caution for accessing a website containing images of child abuse.

Townshend was arrested in January on suspicion of making and possessing indecent images of children as part of Operation Ore, an FBI-led crackdown on internet child pornography.

After a four-month investigation, London's Metropolitan police said that Townshend "was not in possession of any downloaded child abuse images," but had accessed a site containing such images in 1999.

The musician acknowledged using his credit card to enter a website advertising child pornography, but said he was doing research for his autobiography.

The title character in Townshend's rock opera "Tommy" - a deaf, dumb and blind pinball wizard - is sexually abused by an uncle, and Townshend said he believed he had been sexually abused as a young boy, while in the care of his mentally ill grandmother.

But police said it was not a defence "to access these images for research or out of curiousity." Townshend had also claimed that he did a lot of work for charities struggling to stem the tide of online child pornography, but watchdog the Internet Watch Foundation said it had never had any contact with the star.

As part of the cautioning procedure, Townshend's fingerprints, photograph and a DNA sample will be taken by police, and he will be placed on a national register of sex offenders for five years.

Townshend was one of The Who's four founding members, along with bassist John Entwistle, singer Roger Daltrey and drummer Keith Moon. Moon died in 1978 and Entwistle died last year.

The group, founded in London in the early 1960s, was part of the first British rock invasion, alongside the Rolling Stones and The Beatles. Their hits included "I Can See for Miles," "Pinball Wizard" and "Won't Get Fooled Again."

The IWF, a UK industry funded body set up to battle the growing problem of child pornography on the web, said that the number of complaints about child porn on the web had risen 64% to 17,868 in 2002.

Operation Ore, the largest inquiry into child pornography undertaken in the UK, has already led to more than 1,300 people arrested as part of the police investigation, including judges, teachers, doctors, care workers, soldiers and more than 50 police officers.

Two former ministers are also understood to be on a list of suspects obtained from a list of credit card details seized from a US-based sitem, while another high profile music star, 3D from Massive Attack, also had his computer seized earlier this year before being completely cleared.

Operation Ore is the British end of the US justice department's Operation Avalanche, which was sparked when the US postal service closed down the now notorious Landslide Promotions gateway, which is thought to have been used by more than 75,000 people worldwide in the late 1990s.

In August last year a Texan computer consultant, Thomas Reedy, was sentenced to a total of 1,335 years for running the internet child porn empire, which had a turnover of more than £870,000 a month.

Records of up to 7,300 UK-based credit card numbers were passed to the national crime squad and individual forces by the FBI in the spring of 2002, and there have been a series of raids and computer seizures in Britain since May.

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