Music teacher jailed for child porn

A steel-band leader who gave music lessons in schools shared thousands of "hideous" images of child abuse, including rape and torture, with other paedophiles via the internet, a court heard today.

Benedict Everett had more than 7,000 images and videos stored on a computer and memory sticks at his home, including some found on a memory stick hidden inside a lampshade that was found by people living at the address after his arrest in October last year.

Truro Crown Court, where he was jailed for nine months today, heard that the 36 year old, who was musical director of the Hammered Steel music group, lived in an online "fantasy world" sharing sick images, videos and twisted ideas with other paedophiles.

Police traced him via information collected from a paedophile arrested in the North of England. When they raided Everett's home in the village of Lamorna, near Penzance in Cornwall, they also found a carrier bag full of women's underwear he had stolen from local people's washing lines.

Judge Barry Cotter QC, sentencing Everett, told him that even though he had not directly abused children, they had been abused to satisfy the "international market" in child porn which he was part of.

"The stark reality faced by this court is that you had a large amount of very offensive material," he said.

"Children of tender years have been abused to create such images. Given the amount of images, you can only have spent many hours collecting such material. It is clear in your case there is not a large amount but a very large amount (of images)."

The court heard that 320 images were found which were at level 5, the highest in terms of seriousness on the five-point scale use to rank child abuse images. It includes scenes of rape and bestiality.

A further 1,107 images and videos were classified as level 4.

Everett used "peer-to-peer" file sharing websites including Limewire to download and share images and also his fantasies about abusing children.

He admitted 19 charges of making and possessing child pornography and one charge of theft at a hearing in August this year.

PA