WORKERS at a food company were horrified when one of their colleagues showed them a movie clip on his phone of a man sexually abusing a baby girl.
A judge heard it was the second time Ibrahim Okolo (31) of Cross Road, Coventry, had shown obscene images to fellow staff.
Okolo pleaded guilty at Warwick Crown Court to showing an indecent image of a child, possessing an indecent image of a child and possessing an image of extreme pornography.
He was jailed for a total of two years and two months and was ordered to register as a sex offender for ten years and made subject to a sexual harm prevention order.
Prosecutor Andrew Wilkins said that after working for Exhall-based Handmade Speciality Products through an agency, in January this year Okolo was taken on full-time.
But he had obtained the mobile number of his supervisor, and sent him a video showing an act of bestiality involving a man getting a calf to perform oral sex.
Apart from him being told that was not appropriate, no action was taken and the police were not involved.
Then in February Okolo was in the staff changing room at the food company’s factory in Blackhorse Road, Exhall, when a colleague asked to be shown a picture of ‘a nice girl.’
The other employee was expecting to be shown a photo of Okolo’s girlfriend – and was shocked when instead he was shown a video clip of child abuse.
Two other staff members who walked in and were also shown the video clip were horrified and reported the matter to their supervisor, and the police were contacted, said Mr Wilkins.
Following Okolo’s arrest officers found three images which were of ‘of concern.’
The most serious, and the one he had shown his fellow workers, was a video clip lasting almost five minutes and showing a man performing sex acts on a baby girl aged just 6-12 months.
When Okolo was questioned, he said he had sent them by someone else a month or two earlier, so had shown them to the other people.
Simon Hunka, defending, said: “What jumps out is how unusual it is for someone to show to people he doesn’t know very well images of this nature. It displays a rather strange sense of naivety.
“We’re talking about a very small number of images, albeit particularly horrific in their content, and there is no evidence he had been actively searching for them.
“Although he appreciated the activities were illegal, he didn’t believe it was illegal to store such images.
“He viewed it as somewhat akin to having a video of a shooting, where the act itself would be illegal but possession of the video would not.
“He puts some of it down to a cultural difference between this country and his country of origin, Sierra Leone. He says that there, having such images on a phone is not seen as seriously as it is in this country.”
Jailing Okolo, in relation to the image he showed his colleagues, Judge Andrew Lockhart QC told him: “It was plainly a very, very disturbing piece of video footage, and one which would have involved the grossest of abuses of a very, very young child who was effectively raped.
“So upset were your colleagues that they challenged you and said you should not have it; and you said in reply ‘She’s laughing, she likes it.’
“This was an extremely young and vulnerable child, and you had plainly possessed these images for some time.
“You are of previous good character, and you have an emerging understanding that this type of material will not be tolerated in this society.
“But nevertheless this can only be met by an immediate term of imprisonment.”
