Veteran rock guitarist Pete Townshend of The Who has been formally cautioned by police in London for accessing an Internet site in 1999 that featured child pornography.
The Metropolitan Police said Townshend's picture, fingerprints and DNA sample would be posted on Britain's national sex offenders register for five years "as a routine part of the cautioning process".
Townshend was arrested on January 13th after it emerged that he had used his credit card to access a child sex website.
His detention was part of a worldwide swoop on 250,000 individuals whose credit card details turned up in August 2001 on a list of subscribers to a Texas-based Internet portal that gave access to child porn sites.
Townshend publicly acknowledged accessing the site but insisted it was for research purposes and said he believed he had personally been sexually abused as a child.
Police said in a statement on Wednesday it was "not a defence" for an individual to claim that he or she had looked at child pornography "for research or out of curiosity".
But Townshend will not otherwise face prosecution, having "fully cooperated" with investigators, they said.
AFP