A TELECOM engineer has been jailed for ten months after he tried to claim horrific images of children had been put on his laptop by someone who borrowed it.
But he was unable to give the police details – and other legitimate use of the laptop by him had taken place around the same time as some of the illegal downloads.
Bruno Mamedes was jailed after eventually pleading guilty at Warwick Crown Court to three charges of making indecent images of children.
Mamedes (30) of Shilton Lane, Coventry, who had originally denied the charges, was also ordered to register as a sex offender for ten years.
Prosecutor Sally Hancox said the police have ongoing investigations into the traffic in images of child sexual abuse.
Their enquiries led them to identify an IP user address at Mamedes’s address in Coventry, so a warrant was executed there and various items were seized.
They found 43 category A movies of children being subjected to penetrative sexual activity included one which lasted 40 minutes, showing a girl of three or four with an adult female. Other images were less serious.
When Mamedes was arrested, he said he repaired computers for people and while doing so would lend them the laptop.
Miss Hancox, who pointed out that Mamedes was originally from Porto, also observed that the 40-minute movie had sub-titles in Portuguese – and she rejected his assertion in a pre-sentence report that he had been ‘conducting investigative work.’
Michael Anning, defending, conceded: “This passes the custody threshold. The real question is whether that sentence must be immediate.
“He is now 30 years of age, and a man of previous good character. It is therefore all the more shaming for him that his first appearance before the court should be for offences of this kind.”
Mr Anning said Mamedes, a telecoms engineer who lives with his partner, ‘is having difficulty coming to terms with that which he’s done.’
And he added: “He’s not viewed as a lost cause so far as the probation service are concerned. He is assessed as being of low risk of re-offending.”
But jailing Mamedes, Judge de Bertodano told him: “Most seriously there were 43 moving images of category A.
“But to call them images does not give them their full credit, because some were movies as much as 40 minutes long, and some were of children as young as three being sexually abused.
“These are real children. They are not mock-ups or fake, they are real children being sexually abused for a market – and that market is made up of people like you.
“Your downloading of them contributes is a very real way to those children being abused in this way.
“You are clearly in denial about what has happened. You gave one explanation to the police, and a completely different one in the pre-sentence report.
“You downloaded these for your own sexual gratification. The message must go out that if adult men download images of young children being horrifically abused, they will go to prison.”
