Febuary 2012 Plymouth child porn pervert posed as girl of 10 in online chat-room A MAN found with thousands of indecent images of children on his computer posed as a girl of 10 when talking to other men in internet chat-rooms, a court heard. Fergal Kirby encouraged them to perform lewd acts for him on their web-cams. Prosecutor David Gittins told Plymouth Crown Court that Kirby, aged 41, now of Walpole Street, Chester, was caught after setting up an account with a now-defunct website in California. He uploaded a video of children, but police were monitoring the site and raided his home in Plymouth on December 10, 2010. His computer equipment was seized and found to contain more than 5,000 live, cached and saved indecent images. 3,139 were at level one, 308 at level two, 675 at level three, 1,177 at level four and 81 at level five, with level one being the lest serious category and level five the most serious. Police also found 458 prohibited images of children and 37 pieces of extreme pornography. Kirby pleaded guilty to one count of making an indecent image of a child, one count of distribution, nine counts of possession, one count of possessing prohibited images and one of possessing extreme pornographic images. He told police his interest in children had started four years earlier and had become sexual. His search term on the internet was ‘pre-teen hardcore’, and he admitted having a sexual interest in girls aged eight to 13. Barrister Richard Thomas, for Kirby, said it was “fairly rare” for an offender to make admissions to the extent that his client had, and Kirby had made efforts to understand himself and get help. “He has suffered greatly over the last 14 months,” he said. Mr Thomas said Kirby had lost his job, not seen his wife since his arrest and had moved to Chester. The revelations had also had knock-on effects on other members of his family, he said. Judge Francis Gilbert QC said Kirby, of Walpole Street, Chester, deserved full credit for his guilty pleas, but added: “The nature and quantity of these images mark these out as very serious offences.” He jailed Kirby for 12 months, ordered him to remain on the Sex Offenders’ Register for 10 years and imposed a Sexual Offences Prevention Order.