A MAN has been jailed for the second time for large-scale internet sex crimes.

Weeks after he finished one sentence for having hundreds of thousands of indecent images of children, David Hughes, 54, started systematically searching the internet for more sexual images of children, James Gelsthorpe, prosecuting, told York Crown Court.

In 10 months, he accumulated more than 10,000 different videos and photos which he sorted and filed, and distributed to other people by using peer to peer sharing software.

They included images of children as young as four being sexually abused and some of the victims were clearly in pain, said the barrister.

“These are serious offences indeed,” Judge Andrew Stubbs QC told Hughes.

“You have no insight into what you are doing and by your actions, no ability to stop yourself from behaving in this way.”

He said Hughes had been well aware that he had been making the images he downloaded available to others.

Hughes, formerly of Dalby near Pickering, was jailed for 41 months, put on the sex offenders’ register for life and made subject to a sexual harm prevention order including controls of his use of the internet, also for life.

He was jailed in 2016 for 16 months for offences involving indecent images of children when he maintained that he was unaware that by using a particular peer to peer software, he was making the images available to other people.

On November 30, 2018, he pleaded guilty to three charges of distributing images on a similar basis, but later accepted that he knew the consequences of using the software.

He had previously admitted three offences of possessing indecent images.

For him, Alex Menary said he led an isolated and solitary life and there was little mitigation he could offer.

Mr Gelsthorpe said police did not analyse all the videos and images on Hughes’ laptop, external hard drive and iPad.

Of those they did analyse, they found hundreds of duplicates. There were 89 videos and 324 stills of the most serious category of sexual child abuse, 47 videos and 380 stills of the middle category and three videos and 1,648 stills of the least serious category.

The police could not say how many had been distributed.