A 56-year-old man from Santon has admitted possessing almost 3,000 indecent images of children.

Anthony Mark Oates, of Ballnahowe Road, pleaded guilty in magistrates’ court to 10 counts of possessing the images between March 2004 and February 2017.

Oates’ crimes were discovered after he split up with his wife and left their marital home to live with his mother.

Acting on information received, police seized an external hard drive and a number of computer discs from Oates’ former home which were found to contain indecent images of children.

Oates had left the equipment at the marital home when he moved to his mother’s house.

He was arrested on February 7 and a search of his mother’s house found a number of other devices which were seized.

In a police interview Oates admitted all the devices were his and said that he had downloaded the images, but it was around 10 to 15 years ago.

He told police his reason had been for ’curiosity’ and not due to any sexual interest.

He was released pending further investigations but on February 9 Oates contacted the police saying that he wanted to provide further information.

He then handed over a number of hard drives containing more indecent images.

In total, police found 2,912 images, 2,818 of them still images and 94 moving images.

The images were categorised using the Copine Scale, a rating system used to categorise the severity of images of child sex abuse, with one being the lowest rating and five being the most serious.

Of the images found 2,836 were category one, 15 category two, 10 category three, and 51 category four. None were categorised at level five.

On March 30, Oates was interviewed again and said that all the images were historical though he said he had recently transferred some images between hard drives. He reiterated his claim that he had downloaded the images out of ’curiosity’.

Defending Oates in court his advocate Roger Kane asked the court to bear in mind that no images were category five and that his client had very much co-operated with the police.

A basis of plea was handed in by Mr Kane in which Oates said that all the images had been downloaded prior to 2004 and he had not downloaded any since then. It went on to say that he had looked at the images infrequently, that he had not shared any of them, and that many of the images would have been duplicates, meaning that the total would be a great deal lower than stated.

Oates was committed to the Court of General Gaol Delivery and will appear there tomorrow (Friday).