A PERVERT who downloaded and filed a thousand child porn images - more than a hundred at the most serious level - has been jailed for 12 months.

Burnley Crown Court heard how computer worker Alan Brown, 59, was obsessed with pre-pubescent children and had saved images on his computer featuring youngsters aged just five.

Some of the images involved sadism and bondage, the court heard.

Brown had been arrested after the police were contacted by authorities in Russia who had raided a website featuring child pornography and found his details.

The defendant, of Burnley Road, Brierfield, admitted six counts of possessing an indecent photo of a child and six counts of making an indecent photo of a child between November 1998 and December 2006.

He was put on the Sex Offenders Register for 10 years, given a 10-year sex offences prevention order and banned from owning or possessing any computer at home, having unsupervised contact with a child under 16 and from working with children for life. He had no previous convictions.

Louise Whaites, prosecuting, said in 2006 police went to Brown's home on December 6 and searched the property following the tip-off from Russia.

When asked, Brown said there were a few images on his computer and some pictures he had printed in his dressing table drawer.

He claimed he did not have any interest in children and was just bored and lonely.

Brown was arrested and three computers were seized and analysed.

Miss Whaites said 1,023 images were recovered from the computers and 119 of them were at level five, the most serious.

Some of that material had been saved in user created folders and Brown had specifically created folders to move some of the images to.

The defendant told police he had been working in IT since the early 1980s.

Brown told police he looked at porn sites every day for about half an hour.

He said he usually deleted indecent images after downloading them.

The defendant claimed he had looked at videos in the past, but they took too long to download.

Rod Priestley, defending, said Brown accepted he needed help. He would like to know why he had done what he had.

The barrister said: "He accepts he has a problem which needs to be addressed which deals with pre-pubescent children."