A 36-year-old man has admitted possessing thousands of indecent images of children and having extreme pornography featuring an animal.

Mark Snoxell, of Hall Farm Road, Melton, near Woodbridge, pleaded guilty when he appeared before South East Suffolk Magistrates Court to 12 charges involving indecent images of children and two of possessing extreme pornography.

The offences occurred on or before November 26 last year.

Prosecutor Nikki Miller told the court the case followed a familiar pattern.

Police had excecuted a search warrant at Snoxell’s home after officers had received information that an IP address linked to that property had been used to download child pornography.

During the search a number of devices were found and taken away for analysis. These included a Samsung hard drive, a Zoostorm laptop, Samsung laptop, a mini-station hard drive and a Lenovo computer.

Mrs Miller said one hard drive had 45 Level A images - the most serious grading of child pornography - on it, 61 images at Level B and 3,703 at Level C.

Magistrates were told there were also 33 Level A movies, five at Level B and seven at Level C.

Mrs Miller said that was just an example from one device.

A number of other devices had various quantities of images at all levels, the court heard.

Mrs Miller told magistrates: “Clearly this is going to be far beyond your sentencing powers.”

Shelley Drew, representing Snoxell said in due course there will be a great deal of personal mitigation to be given on behalf of her client.

The bench adjourned the case and committed it to Ipswich Crown Court for sentencing.

Snoxell was released on conditional bail. The one condition is that he must not have any unsupervised contact with children.