NORTH Yorkshire Police has won the praise of York’s top judge for the way officers dealt with a sex offender with more than 11,000 sexual videos and pictures of babies and children.

Police were waiting for Mark Ellwood at Luton Airport as he returned from holiday, said Brooke Morrison, prosecuting.

While he was out of the country, they had raided the house in Norton where he had some of his internet devices.

As well as charging him, they referred him to the Lucy Faithfull Foundation which works on rehabilitating sex offenders.

Ellwood’s solicitor advocate Colin Byrne said by the time he appeared before York Crown Court for sentence, he had undergone three group sessions with the foundation and was being lined up for three one to one sessions.

The Recorder of York, Judge Sean Morris, after reading descriptions of the images, called them “ghastly”.

“You started looking at adult pornography and then became addicted to it. Your addiction to adult pornography led you to stray into the underworld of child pornography,” he told Ellwood.

He passed a 12-month prison sentence suspended for two years on condition Ellwood does 30 days’ rehabilitative activities, a probation service sex offender rehabilitation group work programme and the maximum amount of unpaid work possible in a sentence - 300 hours.

Ellwood will also be on the sex offenders’ register and subject to a sexual harm prevention order - both for 10 years.

The judge commended the “good sense” of the police in suggesting to Ellwood that he work with the foundation.

Ellwood, 62, of Welham Road, Norton, pleaded guilty to three offences of downloading indecent images of children, one of having extreme pornography and one of having prohibited images of children.

Ms Morrison said police found internet devices belonging to Ellwood when they raided a Norton house on March 4, 2021.

He was on holiday at the time and they arrested him on March 27 in the arrivals section of Luton Airport. He had a laptop and a mobile phone on him which they seized.

On three of his devices, they found 242 videos and 1,681 pictures of the worst kind of sexual images of children, 180 videos and 3,217 pictures of the next category and 83 videos and 11,802 pictures of the least serious category.

Some of them featured babies that appeared to be six months old, said Ms Morrison.

Police also found 10 pictures of extreme pornography and 314 prohibited pictures of children.

For Ellwood, Colin Byrne accepted that the images were “depraved”.

Because of the work he had done with the foundation, Ellwood had started to realise why it was wrong to look at indecent images of children.

He had voluntarily worked with the foundation to rehabilitate himself.