A senior Japan Football Association (JFA) official has been sentenced to an 18-month suspended jail term in France after viewing images of child sexual abuse during a plane journey, a court official said Tuesday.

Masanaga Kageyama, the association's technical director, was arrested last week during a stopover at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris on the way to Chile to attend the Under-20 World Cup, according to Le Parisien newspaper.

"The facts were discovered by the plane's flight crew, who raised the alarm after noticing that the convicted man was viewing child pornography images on the plane," the court prosecutor's office in Bobigny, north of Paris, said.