A GRANDFATHER has been jailed after police discovered thousands of vile images of child pornography at his former home in Cleethorpes.
Norman Grainger, 67, now of Sheldon Road, Sheffield, pleaded guilty to six counts of possessing indecent images of children and was jailed for 14 months at Grimsby Crown Court on November 19.
The court heard Grainger held 6,345 images and videos on disks and hard drives, which included 53 at the most extreme level five on the rating system used to categorise the severity of images of child sex abuse, and many of which showed the torture of young children.
Police raided Grainger's former Humber Street home in July 2012 after tracing his IP address and arrested him, but during the interview he maintained a 'no comment' response and later fled to Sheffield.
Upon his arrest in South Yorkshire, he told officers he "hadn't exactly been hiding" from them.
The court heard Grainger had stumbled upon the content when browsing online and became "interested and then obsessed" with what he found, spending five years using the images for sexual gratification.
Among the content found by police were images of young girls being gagged and abused, and the torture of a five-year-old.
Defending, Nigel Lumley said Grainger, who served time in prison in the 1970s, had suffered a total breakdown in his relationship with his family as a result of the offences and was "full of shame".
"He did not know throughout his life that he had any propensity towards this sort of thing," he said.
"He does not seek to downplay his involvement at all, he has now in his later life fallen down to this level and is now without his family and friends."
Judge David Tremberg said this was a "very bad example" of such a case and said Grainger had built up a "veritable library of thousands and thousands of images".
"The emotional and physical cost to the victims is incalculable and all you cared about was your own perverted sexual gratification," the judge told him.
"People who behave like that give tacit encouragement for those who post these images to commit further abuse.
"You share responsibility for the suffering of those children and it is imperative that courts deal severely with such behaviour. By moving to Sheffield you sought to evade justice after you became interested then obsessed with these vile images of children."
An unmoved Grainger looked on as Judge Tremberg handed down a 14-month prison sentence, to be cut by half on licence.
Grainger must also register as a sex offender for the next ten years and is prohibited from using any device capable of accessing the internet unless he makes his internet history, which he will not be allowed to delete, available to police on request.
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