Former Amesbury man sentenced after thousands of indecent images of children found
He appeared at Salisbury Crown Court today (Friday 28th May)
A 24 year old man who used to live in Amesbury has been sentenced after more than 20,000 indecent images of children were found on his computers.
Lucas Osbourne, who now lives in North Yorkshire, was facing three counts of making indecent images of children and one count of possessing extreme pornography.
Osbourne was given a three year community order, ordered to carry out 100 hours of unpaid work and undertake 30 sessions on a sex offender programme.
He is also subject to a Sexual Harm Prevention Order.
His arrest came in January 2020 after officers from Wiltshire Police's Child Internet Exploitation Team received intelligence that indecent material was being accessed on Osbourne's devices a month before.
The force carried out enquiries and seized numerous computers, hard drives, cameras and mobile phones when he was arrested.
Although officers managed to retrieve in excess of 20,000 indecent images of children, the national threshold means that only a certain number of these are included in the charges.
The indecent images charges relate to 178 images classed as category A, which is the most serious, 172 category B and 1,414 category C.
129 "extreme pornography" images were also retrieved.
Detective Constable Jason Walsh, from the Child Internet Exploitation Team, said:
"From the moment of his arrest Osborne admitted that he had been downloading and accessing a huge amount of indecent images of children and that he was regularly wiping and cleaning his devices to remove them.
Therefore it is accurate to say that these charges do not reflect the full extent of his offending.
However, it would be impossible for the police to view and categorise all the images we found, therefore the national guidance is to stop counting once we reach a certain threshold.
It is important to remember that every child pictured in these images is a very real victim, a child who has been abused.
We are proactive in our work to identify and track down people who view and download this type of material and people need to understand that you will be caught and you will have to face the consequences."
On their website, Wiltshire Police have some advice and information for anyone that is concerned about someone accessing indecent images of children.