SPECIALIST police found pictures of a Hampshire man wearing a girl’s underwear when they analysed computer equipment from his home.

Gary Dalmas, 47, pictured, had also taken snaps of himself in a girl’s bedroom with her underwear and lying naked on her bed after being invited into the property.

That combined with chat room messages contradicted his claims he had no sexual interest in children, prosecutor Simon Edwards told Winchester Crown Court.

He told how a police team investigating online paedophiles had raided Dalmas’s home and he voluntarily admitted he had sordid images on a hard drive and his computer.

Dalmas told officers that after his relationship with his partner had broken down two or three years earlier, he started using chat room sites which led him to receiving and sending images.

Dalmas, of Ferndale, Hedge End, admitted 16 charges of possessing indecent and extreme images and distributing indecent images which totalled more than 3,000 and involved girls aged between five and 13. He was jailed for two years.

Asking for the court to pass a suspended sentence, Michelle Clarke, defending, said Dalmas needed help and had been receiving treatment at a private foundation.

“He was lonely and down. He fell into a world of fetish and fantasy. He is deeply embarrassed and remorseful at being enveloped into this world. He mistook people with whom he was chatting as friends and went along with it. He knows what he has done is very wrong,” she said.

She said Dalmas recognised taking the picture in the girl’s house was a gross breach of trust but they had been taken some time ago.

“It was fantasy and he indulged himself, but he made no approach to the girl, and however distasteful what he did, it went no further,” she added.

Judge Keith Cutler put Dalmas on the sex offenders’ programme for ten years. Under the terms of a similar length sexual offences prevention order, he is only allowed limited use of a computer and must make the equipment available for inspection by the police.