A PERVERT who had thousands of sickening sexual images of children and animals has been spared jail.

Pensioner Geoffrey Taylor, 70, pleaded guilty to possessing more than 10,000 indecent and extreme images after a police raid at his home in Blackburn uncovered the haul.

Taylor, of Barn Meadow Crescent, downloaded the images between 2002 and 2014, storing them on a laptop, a hard drive, thumb drive and a tablet computer.

Among them were 684 images of the most serious category A, and 228 extreme pornographic images, depicting the abuse of animals. A further 5,448 were computer generated pseudo images.

Preston Crown Court heard Taylor was a man of previous good character who is capable of helping others in the community.

Handing him a suspended prison sentence, Judge Robert Altham told him: “When one looks at the real images, each and every one of them represents the sexual abuse and sometimes rape of living, breathing children.

“Somewhere in the world there is a child who has been sexually abused or raped in order for people like you to gain some form of gratification of them.

“It is beyond any reasonable person to understand how anyone could gain any sort of gratification from watching a person perform a sexual offence with a young child.

“These are not girls in their early teens. They are children under 10 - certainly in one image a child who can be no more than two or three years old.

“That must make the matter more serious.

“People like you, by downloading and looking at these images generate a demand and people like you by generating that demand perpetrate the abuse of little children.

“For that reason you ought to be, and I hope you are, thoroughly ashamed of yourself.”

The judge accepted Taylor’s good character and said he is unlikely to appear before the courts again.

He jailed him for 40 weeks suspended for 12 months and placed him on a curfew for 30 weeks.