Sex offender snared after tip-off from US

A court heard that police raided Thomas Brooks’s house and on his computer found hundreds of indecent images of children.

Other news: Horse riders to protest at dangerous motoristsLocal officers had been contacted by the National Crime Agency about the Leigh 27-year-old’s sickening behaviour after the NCA itself received information from National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children USA.

NCMEC had spotted that a user of a private chat site, with a screen name of “Pervz” had posted a single suspected indecent photograph of a child to the internet using a Sky Internet account registered to Mr Thomas Brooks on July 8 2016.

The hearing at Bolton Crown Court heard that Greater Manchester Police launched an investigation and executed a search warrant at the defendant’s address in Lightburn Avenue, Pennington, on April 5 last year.

Officers seized computer equipment and found evidence of Brooks’s making images and movies.

Of the images retrieved, 148 of them fell into the most serious category of child abuse - A - a further 157 were classified as category B and another 355 as category C.

Brooks appeared before Wigan and Leigh magistrates earlier this year where prosecutor Kate Beattie told justices that the materials recovered by experts on the computer which had been dowloaded by the defendant ranged from indecent images of youngsters to scenes depicting serious sexual abuse.

Brooks pleaded guilty to three charges of making indecent images on dates between January 2010 and April 2017.

He had been on bail until his sentencing before a Bolton judge when he was given a 10-month prison sentence for his crimes which was suspended for two years. Any further offences committed during that time and he could be locked up, the judge warned him.

Brooks was also ordered to sign on the Sex Offenders’ Register for 10 years and handed a Sexual Harm Prevention Order which also lasts for a decade.