A UNIVERSITY student has been spared jailed for possessing thousands of images of bestiality and children after a court heard how he had been bullied at school.

Ieuan Thomas from Luckley Road, Wokingham had been found in possession of 31 extreme images of bestiality and almost 1,000 images of children when police carried out a raid in his home in March 2018, two days before his 18th birthday, a jury was told.

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Judge Emma Nott, who decided to give Thomas a conditional discharge at Reading Crown Court and told him to stay out of trouble and not to smoke any "spliffs" while at university.

She said: “Your account that you were brought into this through a third party seems to me to be right. It seems to me that thereafter, through the natural curiosity of a teenager, it continued.

“I am going to take an extraordinary course in your case.”

The 19-year-old who goes to Coventry University, had started downloading the images when he was just 15 years old, the court heard, after he suffered a "difficult time" at school.

Prosecutor Russell Pyne said: “The police had received information of a Twitter account linked to a specific telephone number and an email address.

“They attended the defendant’s home address in Wokingham, two days before his 18th birthday. They seized two items, a mobile telephone and laptop computer. Those items were forensically examined.”

Mr Pyne told the court how the images, which included 330 category-A images of the most serious kind, showed children as young as three years old.

The police also discovered search terms had been entered including "young", "paedo" and "child."

Thomas had one previous conviction for an assault occasioning actual bodily harm and battery, which had been dealt with in the youth court, the prosecutor added.

Defending Thomas, Ellis Green said: “This was something he was doing when aged 15 and 16 years. He essentially brought it to a stop. All the searches, the web pages, the bookmarks, they all finished in 2016.

“Looking at the strapping 19-year-old in the dock does not give a picture of what this young man was like aged 14 and 15 years. He was very severely bullied at school.”

Judge Nott, sentencing him, said: “This is an unusual case, it is a very sad case.

“You were not having a very good time at school, to put it mildly and it is clear you yourself were particularly vulnerable at the time.

“In terms of punishment, it seems to me that this process itself has been a very significant punishment for you as is the loss of your character.”

Thomas was sentenced at Reading Crown Court on Tuesday, January 28, for four counts of making indecent photographs of children and one count of processing extreme pornographic images of animals and children.

The judge gave Thomas a conditional discharge which would last for one year and allowed him to walk free from court.

Judge Nott said: “For a year you must stay out of trouble. I expect you will stay out of trouble for the rest of your life.

“It may be smoking a spliff of cannabis and I say that to you because you are a young man at university, not because I have any reason to believe you are involved in drugs. Stay out of trouble for a year and it will go away.

"Children looking at images of other children is very different to adults seeking out images of children.”