Jail for child porn ex-policeman

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A retired Metropolitan Police officer has been sentenced to three years in prison for distributing 1,863 indecent images of children on the internet.

Nicholas Richmond, 59, of Greenfinches in Gillingham, Kent, was sentenced at Maidstone Crown Court.

The court heard how images of children aged between eight and 13 years old were distributed over a 10-year period.

He was arrested last April as part of Kent Police's Operation Starlight when officers raided his home.

The indecent images of children were distributed between 1997 and 2007, but detectives also found Richmond, who retired from the Met in 1999, had links to several internet chatlogs.

The court heard how he was said to have exchanged "sexual fantasies" with other individuals on the web.

'Real children'

Sentencing him, Judge James O'Mahony said: "These charges were for sexual gratification and the distribution involved images between a number of members of a perverted internet community.

"The images involved were of real children, real human beings, who were vulnerable to abuse and corruption from those who do what you did and create a market for them."

Officers discovered Richmond's involvement while investigating Vincent Jordan, from Manchester.

He was jailed for 10 years last October after pleading guilty to 20 offences, including incitement to kidnap, incitement to rape a child, and making and distributing indecent images.

Richmond pleaded guilty to 13 counts of distributing indecent images of children and asked for a number of other similar offences to be taken into consideration.