A 67-year-old Franklin man caught with thousands of files containing child abuse material has confessed to vile crimes that date back nearly a decade.
Stephen John Barber pleaded guilty in the ACT Magistrates Court on Thursday to six charges of possessing or accessing child abuse material.
Agreed facts tendered to the court show that Barber's offending began in April 2011, when he started looking at what was in those days known as child pornography.
He came to the attention of the Australian Federal Police roughly nine years later, when a user with his IP address was identified as having accessed child abuse material using the BitTorrent file-sharing service.
Following an investigation by the ACT Joint Anti-Child Exploitation Team, officers seized a computer, two hard drives and two flash drives from Barber in April 2020.
A subsequent analysis of the five devices revealed that they contained a total of 4670 child abuse videos and pictures.
Among the most graphic files were 941 depicting penetrative sexual acts and 224 showing sadism, bestiality, humiliation or torture.
According to the agreed facts, Barber was arrested during the search of his home and taken to the ACT Watch House, where he was charged and granted police bail.
The conditions included a ban on possessing any device capable of accessing the internet.
However, Barber was found to have accessed and possessed seven more child abuse material files using a mobile phone in November last year, when he was taken into custody again and refused bail.
After Barber entered his guilty pleas on Thursday morning, Magistrate James Lawton committed him to the ACT Supreme Court for sentence.
The offender remains behind bars on remand ahead of his first appearance in the superior court next week.
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