Child porn probe police meet musician Townshend

Police officers arrived today at the London mansion of rock star Pete Townshend who has admitted paying to enter a website advertising child porn.

The officers went into his house at the top of Richmond Hill, in south west London, shortly before 3pm.

The 57-year-old star with The Who rock band has said he used his credit card on one occasion to look at a website advertising child porn "purely to see what was there" and that he finds paedophilia appalling.

His name was included in a list of 7,000 people in Britain whose names were passed on to British police by the American authorities who smashed a US pay-per-view service.

Twenty minutes earlier, Townshend had arrived back at the house. A few minutes later, his solicitor John Cohen told reporters: "We are meeting police at the house at 3pm. It's by mutual agreement. We approached the police this morning and said that we should meet."

Shortly before 3pm, three men and one woman marched to the front door, refusing to answer reporters' questions.

One rapped on the doorknocker, and said through the intercom: "Hello, it's DS Coles."

The door was opened and they went inside.

Shortly afterwards, more officers, one carrying a blue plastic crate containing packaging to store potential exhibits, also arrived at the front door and, after a short delay, were admitted.

Officers were involved from Scotland Yard, the paedophile unit, the major investigation team, and child protection units, and all of them were attached to Operation Ore. Computer forensics officers were also present.

Townshend said he is ready to hand his computer over to the police to prove he is not a paedophile, according to an interview with a newspaper.

He said he wanted police to come into his home and check his computer for child pornography.

He said he looked at the front pages and previews of child pornography sites perhaps three or four times after accidentally stumbling across one.

He said he had been driven to see what sort of material they contained for research and out of anger at how easy they were to access.

But the star said he never downloaded the material and only entered a site once, using a credit card, purely as part of research for a book he plans to publish later this year.

"I am not a paedophile. I'd be prepared to have my computer hard drive analysed," he said.

"It's important police are able to convince themselves that, if I did anything illegal, I did it purely for research."

Townshend was condemned by internet watchdogs, who dismissed his explanation for illegally entering the web site as "no excuse".

Campaigners argued that his intentions were at best "incredibly foolhardy, naive and misguided".

Mark Stephens, a lawyer and vice chairman of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), said: "If you want to help children, you don't pay money to a child porn site.

"We strongly discourage anyone from actively seeking out these images of child abuse because it is against the law.

"The IWF has a hotline and we will have it removed at source by the Internet service provider if you come across it inadvertently and we will report it to the NCIS and to Interpol."

He added: "It is wrong-headed, misguided and illegal to look at or download or even to pay to download pedophiliac material and if you do so, you are likely to go to prison."

Townshend - idolised by fans of The Who since the 1960s - said that he had been "deeply wounded" by suspicions that he was a paedophile.

He was speaking out after it emerged at the weekend that a British rock star's credit card details were on a list of subscribers to a website in Texas.

The list, compiled by US authorities, included some 7,000 British names passed to the police in this country.

Two ex-Labour ministers are reportedly on the same list.

Townshend told The Sun: "I am not making any excuses. I am angry about child porn on the internet and deeply wounded at the inference that I might be a paedophile.

"I have looked at child porn sites maybe three or four times in all, the front pages and previews.

"But I have only entered once using a credit card and I have never downloaded.

"With hindsight, it was very foolish but I felt so angered about what was going on - it blurred my judgment."

Earlier Townshend, who has been publicly supported by many celebrity friends, said he had been writing his childhood autobiography for the past seven years.

He believed he had been sexually abused between the age of five and six-and-a-half when in the care of his maternal grandmother, who was mentally ill at the time.

"I cannot remember clearly what happened, but my creative work tends to throw up nasty shadows - particularly in Tommy," he said.

British police are conducting their largest ever investigation, codenamed Operation Ore, into online paedophilia and child pornography.

About 1,300 people, including a judge, magistrates, dentists, hospital consultants and a deputy headmaster have so far been arrested.

Fifty police officers have also been arrested and eight of them charged with offences, including two officers involved in the investigation into the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.