July 2012 Pensioner caught with 12,000 abuse images from web A pensioner became obsessed with sexual abuse images of children after they “popped up” on a cooking website, a court heard. Sean Bonney downloaded more than 12,000 images of varying extremes involving children before trawling through them on his computer, Cambridge Crown Court was told. The 73-year-old, of Fairhaven Close, Lode, who suffers with bipolar disorder, pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to making indecent images of children and three charges of possessing extreme pornographic images, which related to sexual activities involving animals. Thomas Brown, prosecuting, said in March 2010 a recipe-making website, which Bonney regularly used, was “hijacked” and thousands of pornographic images were uploaded to it. During the 18 hours the website was hijacked, 2,223 IP addresses were listed – one of which was Bonney’s. Mr Brown said in May 2011, police took Bonney’s computer away and forensic examinations revealed 12,727 images, ranging from level 1 to level 5, along with 80 movies and nearly 3,000 extreme pornographic images. He said: “What seemed to have happened was this material popped up, he looked at it and downloaded it. He then had a store of material that he was going through over time. As he went trawling through it, he was deleting it. “He explained that he looked at it out of curiosity. It became an obsession with him.” After Bonney downloaded the images, he also typed in “pre-teen models” on an internet search engine, the court heard. In mitigation, Carl Woolfe said it was “a one off” and Bonney had been on the hijacked site for only 20 minutes. He said: “It was not as though he had gone to that site to source material. “He accepts that he became obsessed. He has no interest in children or that type of sexual pornographic images.” Judge Gareth Hawkesworth said Bonney’s actions were at the “bottom end” of this type of offence. He said the “best way of protecting the public” would be a prison sentence of five months, suspended for two years. Bonney was made subject of a two-year supervision order and must complete an internet sex offender’s treatment programme. He ordered a sexual offences prevention order be made for 10 years, meaning he cannot be unsupervised with children under 16 or work with them and any computer he has access to must record his internet history, which child protection and police can access at any time, and he must not delete his internet history. He is also required to register his address with the police for the next 10 years.