A school chef whose perverted interest in children made him a public danger has been jailed.

Police found 3,000 films and pictures of sexual abuse of youngsters, some of them no more than six years old, on Mariusz Borowski’s computer tower, said Rachael Landin, prosecuting.

One video showing the rape of a girl aged four to six was among 11 videos that had been uploaded from his computer by others.

Police also found evidence that for nearly a decade, Borowski had been searching the internet at night for images of children being raped, sexually abused or being subjected to incest.

They arrested him at the school where he worked as a chef in October 2020. When they asked him if he was sexually interested in children he replied “absolutely not”, said Ms Landin.

“That cannot be right,” said Judge Simon Hickey.

He told the defendant: “Even with a sexual harm prevention order, you are a risk or a danger to the public, given the length of time you were searching until being caught in 2020 and your offending stopped.”

He jailed Borowski for 14 months, put him on the sex offenders’ register for 10 years and made him subject to a sexual harm prevention order controlling his use of the internet and allowing police to monitor him, also for 10 years.

York Crown Court heard that none of the children in the photographs were linked to the school.

Borowski’s solicitor advocate Kevin Blount said he had got the job at the school because it was a chef’s job, not to enable him to have access to children, and he did not have day to day contact with children at the school.

He had been sacked shortly after his arrest.

“He suffers from erectile dysfunction, and he accepts he initially began using adult pornography and then he began to use more and more extreme pornography until, he accepts, he was looking at images that were illegal,” said Mr Blount.

Borowski, 45, now of Chatsworth Terrace, Holgate, pleaded guilty to three charges of downloading indecent images of children from the internet, two of distributing indecent images of children and one of having extreme pornography.

Prosecution and defence experts agreed that because he had downloaded illegal material through a particular peer to peer sharing app, that enabled other people to upload the material without Borowski being aware of what was happening. He was guilty of the offence because his actions had made the upload possible.

Ms Landin said police found 486 pictures and 170 videos of the worst kind of sexual abuse, 567 pictures and seven videos of the middle category and 1,885 pictures and 13 videos of the least serious kind of abuse. They also found one video of bestiality and evidence of 11 videos of the worst kind of abuse and one image of the least serious uploaded from Borowski’s computer.

Mr Blount said Borowski had lost the career he loved and was now working as building labourer.