A YORK computer consultant has been jailed for viewing internet child porn.

Paul Martin Fenton's details were among those forwarded to British police by American detectives under the Operation Ore crackdown on people using child porn websites, York magistrates heard.

When York detectives raided his home on April 10, 2003, they found 21 child porn images on his computer, six of which were Level Four on the five-level Copine scale for assessing such images, said Jane Chadwick, prosecuting.

Eleven pictures were at Level One, the lowest, three at Level Three, and one at Level Two.

"Although you were not personally involved in the abuse of children, it is only because of people like you accessing these images that these offences happen," senior magistrate Dr Peter Hogarth told Fenton. "Although distant, you are still part of the sexual abuse of children."

He and his colleagues jailed Fenton for five months, and put him on the sex offenders' register for seven years. They also ordered the destruction of his laptop, which contained the child porn.

Fenton, 31, of Trentholme Drive, off Tadcaster Road, pleaded guilty to one offence of possessing child porn and 16 of making child porn by downloading from the internet.

For Fenton, Mark Thompson said 18 of the images had been deleted the same day as they had been downloaded and could only be accessed with equipment which Fenton did not have.

The images had been downloaded on four days over a ten-day period.

Mr Thompson explained that when downloading images from the internet, the user did not know what would arrive until they were on your computer. In Fenton's case, he had not wanted what he got and had deleted them.

Some of the images were on a disc because they had been automatically backed up with other files, and not because Fenton had put them there.

Fenton was a hard-working man with no previous convictions. The police seizure of his computer had severely affected his business for a time.

Updated: 10:15 Thursday, April 29, 2004