A jury has heard a Buckhaven man, caught with evidence of more than 1,000 of the worst kind of child abuse videos on his computers, downloaded them by mistake.
None of the 1,635 videos or 478 images found on David Soutar’s devices could be accessed by police cyber crime officers.
Soutar is on trial at Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court accused of taking or making indecent photos or pseudo-photos of children.
Soutar, who denies the charge, told officers that when he had tried to download something else and saw the files with incriminating names, he deleted them.
Police interview
The trial heard police had raided the 55-year-old’s former home at Lomond Gardens in Methil on October 10 in 2019.
They arrived at the property Soutar shared with his wife, another man and two teenagers at 8.15am.
When confronted by officers who had a warrant, he denied seeing any child abuse files on devices at the house but said he had seen “pop-ups”, which he blocked.
Cybercrime analysis of Soutar’s second-hand Lenovo laptop and one of his six external hard drives showed child abuse files had been downloaded.
In a police interview which was shown to jurors at the court on Tuesday, Soutar – now of Falcon Road in Buckhaven – explained he had been downloading other files.
In the interview, he told police he was not a paedophile but had clicked to download files which seemed relevant to what he was looking for.
In total, a trio of torrents were downloaded between December 2014 and the date of Soutar’s arrest.
He told police he deleted the files as soon as he realised what they were.
Trial to continue
In total, evidence of 1,117 of the worst category videos and 88 of the worst category of images were found on his two devices.
Evidence of 84 Category B images and 285 Category A videos were also found, along with 306 category C images and 233 Category C videos.
All the files were inaccessible.
Both devices were forensically examined between May and June in 2020.
The trial, before Sheriff Elizabeth McFarlane, will continue on Thursday.
