Masanaga Kageyama, the Japan Football Association’s former technical director, was handed an 18-month suspended prison sentence by a French court on Monday after he was caught watching sexually explicit images of a child on a flight to Paris.
The 58-year-old official, who was en route to the Fifa Under-20 World Cup in Chile, was arrested upon arrival at Charles de Gaulle Airport on October 2, following a report from an Air France flight attendant in business class who witnessed him viewing the material on his personal tablet.
Kageyama admitted in court to viewing the images and said he was “ashamed”, but claimed he was unaware that accessing AI-generated child abuse imagery was a criminal offence under French law.
He maintained that the images formed part of an art project and could not be considered pornographic as they were generated by artificial intelligence, Agence France-Presse reported.
Any pornographic depiction of minors, whether real, fictional or computer-generated, are explicitly criminalised under French law.
