An Interpol investigation into the downloading of child-abuse images on to a Croatian astronomy group's website led to the appearance of a 51-year-old Otago man in the Dunedin District Court yesterday.
The man, who has interim name suppression, admitted one representative charge of possessing objectionable material.
He was convicted by Judge Stephen O'Driscoll and remanded on bail for sentence in May.
Eighty-seven objectionable images were found on the man's computer hard-drive after it was seized and analysed last August.
They were not related to those on the astronomy website, prosecutor Sergeant Ross Hutton told the court.
New Zealand Police received information from Interpol in December 2007 about an investigation into people who had been accessing the 99 child images downloaded by an internet protocol address allocated in Estonia.
When police spoke to him on August 18, the defendant admitted accessing the images and downloading them.
He said he had spent much time on the computer while he was off work, and had accessed the sites during that time.
