A retired BBC sound engineer from Surrey has been jailed after he was found to be in possession of over 58,000 indecent images of children - but tried to defend himself by saying the content he consumed was “simply kids enjoying themselves”.

David Mundy, from Esher, was arrested by NCA officers on April 13, 2022, after attempting to download illegal content.

The 85-year-old admitted that he had first been looking at sexual images of children shortly before retiring from the BBC in 1998.

He claimed that he was “unsure what the definition of abuse was” and tried to defend himself by saying his interest was “only in pleasure”.

It was found that he had searched for indecent images of children and kept thousands of them on floppy discs, CDs, USBs and hard drives for over two decades.

47 digital storage devices were seized during a search of Mundy’s home and 31 of these were found to contain indecent images of children.

He has labelled these storage devices which included Micro SDs marked “Misc = boy undone”; “Franze, Czech etc. lots” and “several vid+pix”.

Almost 2,500 images found on his devices were category A, the most extreme.

The videos that he had accessed online involved children as young as six years old, though the majority of the images involved boys between eight and fifteen.

NCA officers also found a 15-page double sided booklet called “sensitive content movies” which were then sorted by keywords, and several guides on accessing the dark web whilst keeping his anonymity online, Mundy was charged the following year with three offences relating to indecent images of children.

Today, April 29 2024, he was sentenced at Guildford Crown Court to 10 months imprisonment after pleading guilty.

Adam Priestley, NCA Senior Manager, said: “Despite clear evidence showing the scale of his offending, and the horrific nature of the content he repeatedly accessed, Mundy told officers that the images he had saved simply showed kids enjoying themselves.

“This could not be further from the truth. Behind each image is a vulnerable child who has been violated and abused for the benefit of offenders like Mundy.

“We at the NCA are committed to protecting children and ensuring that individuals who collect this material, creating a demand for abuse content, are held to account.”