A 69 year old Newent man used sophisticated software to try to erase hundreds of child porn images from his computer - but police were still able to find it, Gloucester Crown Court has heard.

Kenneth Clements, formerly of Russett Way, Newent, but now living in Woking, Surrey, admitted eleven charges of illegal possesion of a total of 725 indecent images.

Recorder David Bartlett sentenced Clements, whose marriage has broken up as a result of his offences, to a three year community order with supervision and a requirement to attend the Thames Valley Sex Offender programme

Clements was also banned from working with children or vulnerable adults, ordered to sign the sex offender register for the next five years, and made the subject of a sexual offences prevention order.

Mr Kesner said police raided Clements' home on June 12th last year as a result of him downloading child porn exactly six months earlier from a file sharing site.

"An aggravating feature of the case is that an attempt was made to erase the indecent images using sophisticated software designed to wipe hard drives clean and remove images and change the location where data is kept," said Mr Kesner.

"However, the police have their own programmes where, notwithstanding this software, they can recover images when people think they have deleted them totally from their hard drives."

Mr Kesner said 371 of the images found were the least serious level one, 72 were level two, and 132 were level 3. He told the court it was possible there had been even more images on the computer which had been successfully deleted.

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