A CONVICTED paedophile who was subject to notification requirements illegally set up a social media profile in another man’s name.

David Forshaw, a 66-year-old motorcycle business boss, told officers that he had created a Facebook profile in the name of David Easton so he could communicate with a female in Thailand and try to keep it a secret from his partner.

Creating the account and not declaring it to the police put Forshaw in breach of notification requirements which had been placed upon him in 2013, when he was sentenced for possession and distribution of a raft of vile images.

The defendant, now of Whitebirk Road in Blackburn, was also jailed for 16 months for those offences.

Preston Crown Court heard how officers attended Forshaw’s Darwen motorbike garage on March 3 of last year, where they found and seized a device on which the profile was active.

He was later arrested and charged with several other charges, but the Crown Prosecution Service later offered no evidence on those counts and so Forshaw was only dealt with for count of failing to comply with his notification requirements.

Forshaw represented himself in court and said: “I have not committed any offence in the last eight years. I was not aware I was breaching my SHPO restrictions at the time. If I had been aware, I would have asked for permission to use the name.”

He went on to say that he created the profile with the sole intention of communicating with the woman in Thailand, and not for any illegal reasons.

Jailing him for 12 months, suspended for two years, Judge Simon Medland QC said: “I have listened to the points you made in mitigation. I am quite clear in my mind that even upon a guilty plea, this crosses the custody threshold.

“However, because of the mitigation peculiar to this case – especially in the sense of the uncertainty as to the real sexual motivation that there may have been, if any, in your transgression which you have accepted, I am left in the position where it is my judgement that the proper sentence is a sentence of imprisonment but to suspended it.”

Forshaw must also comply to a three month electronically monitored curfew.