A MAN facing jail after being caught with more than 10,000 pornographic images of children on his computer is thought to have committed suicide hours before he was due to be sentenced, a court heard.
The 42-year-old, from the Lutterworth area, was to appear at Leicester Crown Court for sentencing on Monday, having admitted ten charges of possessing indecent images.
He had pleaded guilty at Harborough Magistrates’ Court in September to possessi
ng 10,443 indecent images of children, including 248 at the most serious level five, which can include sadism against children.
He had also admitted “trading” 3,900 of the sick images online with other people.
But at Monday’s hearing prosecutor Alan Murphy told the court: “It is feared that [the defendant] has committed suicide.
“The information that the police have given us leads us to the view that in due course his identification is likely to be confirmed.”
During an earlier hearing, magistrates had imposed a section 11 order banning the publication of the man’s name and address in order to protect the children of the family from the probability of being named.
The Lutterworth Mail and the Leicester Mercury both contested the order on the basis that it was unlawful – The Court of Appeal ruled in 2008 that a section 11 order imposed by a judge at Croydon Crown Court for similar family reasons was illegal.
A decision was due on Monday, but after hearing of the man’s death, His Honour Judge David Price decided to extend the order until a further hearing at the court on November 30.
The court heard the man’s family intended to apply for the reporting restrictions to remain in place.
Judge Price said: “The section 11 order will remain. Whether it is valid or not, it can be dealt with on the next occasion.”
Prosecutor Sukhjit Singh had told Harborough magistrates back in September that the man was trapped when an undercover police officer from the Metropolitan police, posing as a paedophile, caught him trading images via the MSN online chat service.
The man’s home was raided by police in January last year, when they had seized a video player, memory cards, a PC tower and a desktop computer.
Mr Singh said two-thirds of the images found were at levels one to three, more than 2,600 were at level four and 248 were at level five – the most serious.
Evidence obtained from the man’s computer, such as chat logs, clearly showed he had sent images to other people, added Mr Singh.
The man had been convicted of indecent exposure in the 1990s, the court heard.
Magistrates decided they did not have sufficient powers to sentence the man and bailed him to appear at crown court for sentencing.
