BRITAIN: Two members of the British parliament are under investigation for accessing child pornography websites as part of a huge police operation which this weekend embroiled rock star Pete Townshend.
Sources have confirmed that the names and credit-card details of the two MPs are on a list of subscribers to a child porn Internet portal sent to Scotland Yard by the US authorities.
The MPs, who are both reported to be former Labour ministers, are the latest public figures to become caught up in Operation Ore, the largest inquiry into child pornography undertaken in Britain.
More than 1,300 people have already been arrested as part of the investigation, including judges, teachers, doctors, care workers, soldiers and more than 50 police officers.
On Saturday Townshend, lead guitarist with rock legends The Who, admitted that he had used his credit card to access a child pornography website. This followed newspaper reports that Scotland Yard detectives were investigating a "legendary British rock star" and deciding whether to make an arrest.
Townshend (57) will be questioned by detectives and have his computer removed for analysis before police decide whether to press charges. In a statement, he vehemently denied being a paedophile and said he had visited the site solely for the purposes of researching a campaign against child abuse and for a book he is writing.
The rock star, who believes he was sexually abused by his maternal grandmother between the ages of five and six, said: "I've been in touch with Scotland Yard to tell them what I was doing. I have contacted them but no police officers have contacted me. I was worried this might happen and I think this could be the most damaging thing to my career."
His spokesman said Townshend had called Scotland Yard three months ago because he was concerned about things he had seen on the Internet. A source said yesterday that police were urgently trying to establish whether Townshend had been in touch and if so what he had told them and if it was close to the time he visited the site.
Mr Mark Stephens, a lawyer who founded the Internet Watch foundation, an independent watchdog, yesterday condemned the rock star's actions as "wrong-headed and illegal" and described his explanation as "no excuse".
"It is OK to lobby. There are many high-profile individuals who fight against child pornography," Mr Stephens said, "but it is wrong-headed, misguided and illegal to look at or download or even to pay to download paedophiliac material and if you do so, you are likely to go to prison."
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.
Last August, a Texas computer consultant, Thomas Reedy, was sentenced to 1,335 years for running the Internet child porn empire, which had a turnover of more than $1.4 million a month. Although the ring was technically operating through a "gateway" based in Texas, the material being accessed was sited around the world, principally Russia and Indonesia.
This arrangement made it far harder to crack than standard criminal operations as it was twice as hard for investigators to find out who was behind the sites. However the weakness in the system was that subscribers had to provide a credit-card number so that Reedy's gateway could verify who they were before charging them for access to the 5,700 sites within the network.
Once the authorities cracked the code scrambling the credit-card numbers, they were able to track down the card-owners. - (Guardian service)