A FACTORY manager has been jailed after police found indecent images of children on his computer.

Stephen Edwards, 59, pictured, was IT manager at Malton Foods Ltd when a police raid uncovered his four-year trawl of the internet for indecent images of youngsters, which he downloaded on to laptops found at the factory and at his home, Aisha Wadoodi, prosecuting, told York Crown Court.

Detectives went to the factory following a tip-off from the national Child Exploitation and Online Protection squad that someone there was accessing illegal images.

Three years earlier, a young girl had told police Edwards had sexually abused her, but she couldn’t face going to court and Edwards was not prosecuted.

York Crown Court heard that after Edwards, now of The Avenue, Pateley Bridge, pleaded guilty on the day of his trial to 11 charges of having indecent images of children, he told a probation officer that he was innocent and wasn’t sexually interested in children.

Judge Robin Mairs told him: “It is abundantly clear from the evidence you do have such an interest and sought out these images.

“There can be no doubt these were very young girls and they were being caused very real pain.”

Edwards, as IT manager, was the only person with administration access to the company’s computers, and therefore the only person able to use them to access pornography.

Representing him, Taryn Turner said he had lost his job at the factory following the raid in December 2014 and had been “humiliated”.

She said he would struggle to get work in the computer industry again.

Edwards was jailed for seven months, put on the sex offenders’ register for ten years and made subject to a sexual harm prevention order indefinitely restricting his use of the internet and enabling police to monitor what he was doing online.

He will also be banned from working with children.

Ms Wadoodi said police found a document in which he had detailed what he would say if the police investigated him.

They also found many indecent images which had been deleted. Eight pictures and one video of the most serious kind of indecent images of children, six of the medium category and 169 of the least serious category could be accessed by the laptops user and Edwards was the only person with accounts on them.