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Pietermaritzburg — An elderly man apparently obsessed with child pornography found himself in court on Thursday after being bust by his wife, who accidentally discovered the images on his personal computer. The 77-year-old pensioner made a brief appearance in the Pietermaritzburg Magistrate’s Court, charged with the possession of child pornography.
He was arrested on Wednesday at the old age home in an upmarket Pietermaritzburg suburb where he lives with his wife, after the Cyber Crime Unit tracked 340 images of child pornography on the hard drive of his laptop computer.
The man cannot be named as he has not yet pleaded to the charge.
He was arrested after his wife reported to police that he had images of child pornography on his computer.
It is alleged that he kept the images of the children on his laptop from 2007 until April 2013, and had visited websites that contained child pornography, downloading images from the sites.
His wife, 72, found out about his obsession in 2007. The wife alleges that this had caused her great distress. In a statement, she said she realised that something was amiss by her husband’s strange behaviour. Whenever she entered the bedroom that she shared with him, he would be busy on the laptop. As he saw her come in, he would quickly change the image on his screen and she therefore became suspicious.
On one occasion, she caught him in the act of watching pornography featuring young girls. Disgusted with what she saw, she confronted him and was assured that he would stop surfing the sites. However, she found him viewing pornographic images on his laptop on numerous subsequent occasions.
At some stage, he gave his wife an old desktop computer that contained folders named with lewd terms referring to child pornography. These contained pornographic images, which the wife deleted.
On another occasion, she was using the laptop for banking purposes when, as she typed the web page address into the browser, a list of pornography sites he had visited appeared. The wife also found a flash drive and disc belonging to him in a box in their study, which also contained pornographic images of children. At that point she asked for help from a relative.
“My discovery that he was obsessed with child pornography and his failure to stop viewing it led to great stress in our marriage, so much so that I appealed for help from a family member. It’s not nice for me and I don’t want to speak about it,” said the wife when contacted on Thursday.
The man’s daughter and son-in-law were also shocked to discover his use of child pornography and wanted him reported to the police. The man, who looked confused as he appeared before Magistrate Ashin Singh, applied for a legal aid attorney. He raised his hand and told the court that some pictures in the file brought to court by the investigating officer were of his grandchildren, and he wanted them removed. This request wasn’t granted. He was remanded until 13 February for a bail application. — The Witness
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