A former GP and paediatrician was caught with one of the largest collections of child sexual abuse images the National Crime Agency has ever seen.
David Shaw used anonymisation techniques on peer-to-peer sharing network and website Freenet to download indecent images of children before the NCA was able to establish his real identity. The 48-year-old was arrested at his former home in Maidstone, Kent in February 2019, and when his devices were searched, 16 of them were found with 1,278,256 images in categories A-C (A being the most severe).
The categories were explained to him and Shaw told officers all three types of images would be found on his devices. Shaw had trained at Guy's Hospital Medical School and graduated in 2004. He was then registered with the General Medical Council and practised as a GP between 2005 and 2013 before his GMC membership lapsed and he no longer worked as a doctor.
