Pen camera used to spy on girls in shower, court hears

A Rotorua man has appeared in court accused of secretly filming girls as young as 12 in the shower using a camera disguised as a pen.
The 46-year-old, who works in IT, was granted interim name suppression when he appeared before Judge Jocelyn Munro in the Rotorua District Court yesterday.
He faces 16 counts of making intimate recordings of girls aged between 12 and 17 years at Rotorua between 2007 and 2009.
Police allege the man set up a covert camera, which looked like a pen, in a bathroom, turning it on when the girls were taking showers and getting changed.
The accused has not entered pleas to the charges and has been remanded on bail to reappear in court on November 23, when he is expected to plead to the charges. He also faces one charge of possession of hash cookies. Hash is a cannabis derivative.
The case is not the first in Rotorua in recent years involving a covert camera being used to record people.
Three people were secretly filmed in the toilets of Rotorua's Starbucks coffee shop in 2008 by 25-year-old Chinese national Feiyu Zhou.
Zhou was a restaurant supervisor who between June 1 and 15, 2008, hid a handicam digital video recorder inside the unisex toilet of the cafe, filming five people using the toilet while he waited in the shop.
He had told police he had an addiction to watching women go to the toilet.
When Zhou was sentenced, Judge Phillip Cooper noted his offending was a "serious breach of privacy".
His work permit was later revoked by the Department of Labour.