A Suffolk clergyman who filmed men using a public toilet in a shopping centre is to be sentenced today.

The Very Rev Martin Thrower, of Church Street, Hadleigh, admitted two counts of voyeurism at an earlier hearing at Norwich Crown Court.

William Carter, prosecuting, said the 56-year-old rector was caught when a 17-year-old heard a noise above him as he sat on the toilet in the Buttermarket shopping centre in Ipswich.

The teenager saw someone’s hand holding a mobile phone that was filming him over the cubicle partition, and he grabbed the phone.

Thrower was arrested after the incident on August 4 last year and officers found three further videos recorded on the phone that day, including of two other men who had not noticed they were being filmed.

Officers later found almost 600 similar images, of “hundreds of different men”, on computer equipment seized from Thrower’s home.

Thrower is rector of Hadleigh, Layham and Shelley.

He has been suspended from all roles by the Diocese of St Edmundsbury in Ipswich and is listed to be sentenced at Norwich Crown Court.