A paedophile who collected hundreds of photos and videos of children being sexually abused was in contact with "like-minded individuals" on Snapchat, a court has heard. Among the sickening images Maximillian Gilford downloaded was a five-minute long video showing a baby boy being defecated on by a man.
Swansea Crown Court heard police found more than 800 indecent images on the defendant’s electronic devices but that number was likely a "significant underestimate" of the true amount he had as officers did not count and categorise the large number of images he had in a stored in an online cloud account. Paul Hobson, prosecuting, said police executed a search warrant at Gilford’s house in August last year and seized a number of electronic devices including a Samsung phone and a computer hard drive.
Linked to the phone was a Mega cloud storage account. An examination of the devices found 815 images including 277 Category A videos showing the most extreme kinds of sexual abuse. The court heard the videos included one showing a boy aged between nine and 11 being raped and another, which lasted more than five minutes, showed a baby boy being defecated and urinated on by an adult male.
