A YOKER pervert who admitted possession of a sickening stash of hundreds of thousands of indecent pictures and videos of children has claimed he didn’t know he was downloading child pornography.

Andrew Thornton made the claim in an interview with a social worker, a court was told last week.

Thornton, 33, was due to be sentenced at Dumbarton Sheriff Court on Friday after he pleaded guilty in January to a charge of taking, or permitting to be taken, indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of children.

The offence was committed at a three-bedroomed detached home in Doveholm Road, Dumbarton, between September 2015 and July 2016.

January’s hearing had been told police found around 374,926 indecent still images and 4,442 moving images of children in the raid, which took place on May 24, 2017.

But at Friday’s hearing, Sheriff Maxwell Hendry said a background report identified a “major issue” with Thornton’s guilty plea.

Sheriff Hendry said: “Something approaching 380,000 images were found, and [according to the report] he knew nothing of them.”

Thornton’s lawyer, Scott Adair, said: “The way he describes it to me, what he describes as an adult person must clearly have been a young teenage girl.”

Sheriff Hendry, quoting from the social work report on Thornton, continued: “He could offer no understanding as to how this vast amount of photographs or pseudo-photographs got on to his computer, and stated that they just ‘appeared’.”

And the sheriff also pointed out that a psychological report on Thornton, of Bulldale Street, had concluded that he “must have given some thought to hiding the images on the [computer] drive to prevent discovery by others”.

Mr Adair said: “The way he describes it is that he doesn’t say he didn’t do it – he fully accepts that he did do it – but that perhaps in the state of mind he was in at the time, he wasn’t fully aware of what it was he was doing.”

Again quoting from the background report, Sheriff Hendry replied: “He could not understand why he had indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of children on his devices and denied actively looking for those.

“He said he was only downloading adult porn, and denied seeing a single photograph or psuedo-photograph of children.”

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Procurator fiscal depute Martina McGuigan said the number of images, and their content, meant the Crown could not accept Thornton’s claims.

January’s hearing was told that 47 of the moving images found, and 51 of the still images, were at the most serious category A level, with the vast majority at category C.

The Crown was given until April 29 to seek further information. Thornton’s bail was continued.