A BUSINESSMAN from Alderbury has been found guilty of sexually assaulting a child, taking indecent photos of a child and downloading hundreds of indecent photos of children.

Peter Barker, of Rectory Road, denied all the charges but was found guilty by a jury yesterday at Winchester Crown Court after an eight-day trial.

The 67-year-old who runs the electronics business PDS Instruments was first arrested in May 2014 after police received the details of people from Canadian police who were buying films from Asov, a Canadian company which supplied films depicting children, in particular boys, in naked and semi naked states.

Invoices showed he had bought 36 items between July 2010 and April 2011, spending hundreds of pounds on DVDs and downloads.

Barker said he had ordered a couple of the films because he thought they were naturist films and that he destroyed them when he realised they were not.

He said as the company had his credit card details, it continued to send them and took payment.

No charges were brought against Barker over the Asov films but, in analysing his computers, police found hundreds of indecent photos of children on four of his laptops and his desktop computer.

Barker denied downloading or looking at child pornography, saying he had found it all on a 'rogue' hard drive in a second hand computer he had bought from eBay in 2010.

When asked why his internet history showed he had searched for sites showing a sexual interest in boys, he said he was a curious person and wanted to find out where the material from the hard drive had come from, adding that he had been shocked by the titles of the images and had copied and pasted them into his computer rather than type them.

He said it became an obsession to find out where they came from and he collated the information in a spreadsheet, which no longer exists.

In another case, he said one of his internet searches which ended up at an extreme porn site was prompted by a news story.

Police also found link files to movies of child porn, to which Barker said he must have unintentionally dragged them over from the hard drive to his computers.

While Barker said he had destroyed the actual hard drive in a log splitter in 2012, police were able to recover deleted files on his computers.

The court heard Barker made admissions to both a child protection charity and his now estranged wife following his arrest, telling the former he had lost his friends, family and home and wanted help as he realised he had a problem.

But in court he said he had exaggerated his problems and insisted he had no sexual interest in children.

Barker was found guilty of one count of sexual assault on a young child, two counts of taking indecent photos of children and nine counts of downloading indecent photos of children between September 26, 2008 and May 7, 2014.

In his summing up, Judge Richard Parkes said: "The material was well spread round, not just tucked away on one computer. And not just images, full size and thumbnail, also internet history and search terms.

"He had searched for sites showing a sexual interest in boys."

He added: "He says he found a hidden partition on a hard drive he had bought containing thumbnails of indecent images of children - he knew he had a tainted hard drive full of child pornography.

"He didn't go to the police or destroy it there and then, he plugged it into other computers."

He will be sentenced next Friday at Winchester Crown Court.