A PAEDOPHILE who was caught with nearly three million indecent images of children has been hauled back before the courts.

Riccardo Gargiulo was spared jailed in September last year, when the 50-year-old was found to have collected an ‘extensive’ number of indecent images of children aged as young as nine over a period of five years.

He was given a 10-month jail sentence suspended for two years at Liverpool Crown Court and ordered to carry out 200 hours unpaid work.

But Gargiulo, from Orford, was brought back to court last week after breaching his sexual harm prevention order.

The IT technician deleted the internet search history on his mobile phone, which the 10-year order banned him from doing.

Gargiulo admitted the breach and was handed a 12-month community order, an additional 80 hours on unpaid work and a 10-day rehabilitation activity requirement on Thursday, July 4 – as well as being told to pay a victim surcharge.

Police had previously raided his home in August 2017, with a laptop and hard drives seized from the property.

Searches of this equipment revealed a total of 2.9million indecent images of children that Gargiulo had collected between 2012 and 2017.

Officers were unable to analyse all the material found on the computer due to the sheer number of images, and instead looked at a sample.

Contained in this sample were 86 category A images, 57 category B images and 1,897 category C images as well as 118 prohibited cartoon images depicting children – including a total of five videos.

Gargiulo, who had no previous convictions, had also bookmarked a Russian website ‘well-known’ for containing indecent images of children on his internet browser.

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Described by judge Gary Woodhall as an ‘intelligent and articulate man who has lived an isolated life’, he admitted three counts of making indecent images, possession of indecent images and possession of prohibited images.