Townshend meets police by 'mutual agreement'

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.

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 The Sun 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 told The Sun.

“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”.