Paedophile's website sting

UNDERCOVER detectives netted a paedophile by advertising for one while posing as the Suffolk operator of a website that attracted perverts from around the world.

Officers tracked down the chatroom - where people could trade horrific footage of child abuse - and arrested the operator, 28-year-old Timothy Martin Cox, of Buxhall.

They then assumed the operator's identity and emailed users asking for a volunteer to take over the running of the site - and unmarried computer technician Gordon McIntosh stepped forward.

McIntosh, 33, of Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, was yesterday jailed for an indefinite period at Luton Crown Court after admitting distributing, making and possessing indecent images of children.

Judge Richard Foster said McIntosh was a public danger and must stay in prison until experts decided it was safe to free him.

Police found more than 1,500 indecent images of children on McIntosh's computer, some showing the worst categories of abuse.

Judge Foster said McIntosh was downloading or uploading material 24 hours a day and had been viewing indecent images since his mid-20s.

“It makes me feel almost physically sick,” said the judge, who banned McIntosh from using computers or working with children. It is one of the very worst cases certainly I have ever seen of his nature.”

Two weeks ago Cox, who ran the website from his parents' farmhouse in Brettenham Road, was also jailed for an indefinite period by a judge at Ipswich Crown Court.

Experts who seized the brewer's computer equipment found he had nearly 76,000 indecent images of children as well as more than 1,000 films, which amounted to two weeks worth of continual viewing.

Cox was arrested in September last year and admitted six offences of possessing indecent photographs of children for show, two offences of distributing indecent photographs of children and one charge of possessing indecent images of children.