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A 19-year-old has been sentenced to two years in youth detention after police officers found over 17,000 indecent images of children, including over 3,000 of the most serious nature, on his electronic devices.
Thomas Joseph Benjamin Rondel, who also admitted he had exchanged images with other online offenders, made the majority of images while he was under the age of 18.
He appeared in Royal Court before the Superior Number – a panel that only assembles for the most serious case - yesterday, having entered guilty pleas in early December. He was represented by Advocate James Bell.
Officers uncovered the images on Rondel’s laptop, iPad and iPhone after executing a search warrant in June 2020.
Rondel was interviewed later that day and provided passwords for his electronic devices and cloud storage accounts, as well as details for his email accounts.
He admitted he had been viewing indecent images of children since he was 14 or 15 years old and downloaded thousands, and that he had a sexual interest in children aged seven to eight upwards.
The Police's Hi-Tech Crime Unit analysed three of the seized devices and the cloud storage account. The laptop was subject to an exhaustive analysis and 17,315 indecent images of children were found - more than 3,000 of which were of the most extreme nature.
Further indecent images of children were located on his iPad, iPhone, and two online storage accounts.
Rondel admitted he had downloaded the images between 1 September 2016 and 24 June 2020 and the Crown Advocate noted he was therefore a young person, aged 15 to 18, for three of the four years his offending spanned.
Following analysis of the devices, Rondel was interviewed again and said he was not surprised by the number of images that had been found.
The Court sentenced Rondel to two years in youth detention. They also ordered for his name to stay on the Sex Offenders' Register for at least seven years and imposed a restraining order for the same period.
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