Former ACT candidate, teacher, guilty of child porn

A 60-year-old former teacher and Act Party general election candidate from North Canterbury has been found guilty on 24 child pornography charges.

Malcolm Albert Spark of Kaiapoi was yesterday remanded in custody after the jury returned guilty verdicts at the end of a three-day trial in the Christchurch District Court.

Spark stood for ACT in the 1999 election, winning 584 votes in the Waimakariri seat. He was also on the party list, at No 41.

Judge David Saunders remanded Spark in custody for a probation report and sentence on April 30, the Christchurch Court News website reported.

It was the first trial of its kind in the South Island prosecuted by the Department of Internal Affairs.

Claire Boshier was the prosecutor, and Sonia Vidal of Queenstown appeared as Spark's defence counsel.

The jury convicted him on all the charges: 10 counts of making an objectionable publication and 14 counts of knowingly possessing an objectionable publication.

The publications related to child sexual exploitation.

The department's case was that Spark had taken part in on-line chats with girls aged from nine to 15 in 2005, which led to him obtaining images which he put with a summary of what he had learned about the girls during the chats.

Spark was a teacher, and then a courier van driver, and is now unemployed.

Spark has had name suppression as the case proceeded, but the interim order was lifted once the jury returned its verdicts yesterday.

The case came to light after the mother of a North Island 12-year-old girl intercepted a photograph of the man's erect penis, sent over the internet.

The man initiated contact with the girl through her Zorpia social networking web page when she was 11.

The mother found chat conversations that seemed to be sexual, contacted Internal Affairs, then operated her daughter's Zorpia profile, recording the conversations and the source's electronic address.

Because the mother intercepted the penis picture, no charges were brought in relation to that incident.

However, inquiries with United States Customs showed a 12-year-old American girl received the same material personally.

Police were notified after comments made in chats with the North Island girl talked about "meeting" and "being together". Search warrants identified the defendant.

His house was searched and a camera, hand-held computer, desktop computer, laptop computer, discs, and diskettes seized.

The desktop computer contained a directory of password-protected documents containing more than 1200 image files and 96 document files, Internal Affairs told NZPA last year.

Spark had recorded a detailed summary with most chat logs in which he included the girls' ages, weights, measurements, locations and the sexual practices he had discussed with them.

More than 6000 chat contacts were found on the man's computer, many with file names suggesting they were young girls.

Chat logs showed Spark masturbated while chatting with young girls or looking at their pictures.

One of the seized diskettes contained eight stories written by the defendant in 1999, describing sexual acts between an adult male and girls aged 10 and 12.

Interviewed by police on the day the search warrants were executed, he admitted chatting to the North Island 12-year-old and sending her a picture of his penis.

He said this was typical of his online chats which were generally "about sex". He'd saved chat logs and pictures of the girls he chatted with, but denied they were objectionable.

He described online sexual chat with 12 year-olds as "fun and sexually exciting" but said his activities were "harmless" and the girls could "block" him from their computers if they wanted.

- NZPA