A Fife paedophile who claimed he “accidentally” downloaded more than 1,000 child abuse videos has been jailed for three years.

David Soutar was found guilty by a jury of taking or making indecent images of children following a trial in January.

A cybercrime police specialist said that if all the video files on his devices were played back to back, the runtime would be three days.

Soutar, 55, appeared in the dock for sentencing at Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court.

Sheriff Elizabeth Mcfarlane told him: “I can see no alternative way of dealing with you other than by way of custody given the number of category A images which you had.”

Soutar was also placed on the sex offenders register.

He had admitted to police that he had the files on his second-hand Lenovo laptop and one of his six external hard drives but said he deleted them as soon as he saw the vile descriptive names.

The cybercrime specialist, who forensically examined Soutar’s computing equipment, said the files had been deleted from both the laptop and hard drive, so were inaccessible to police.

However, traces of their existence remained and police were able to deduce from the horrifically descriptive names what they contained.

File names uncovered by police suggested some of the images and videos related to incest and at least one title Soutar downloaded indicated the abuse had been recorded in the 1970s and had been converted from VHS.

In a police interview shown to jurors, Soutar said he had been trying to download instructions for programming language C++.

Soutar, who also told officers that he was not a paedophile, opted not to give evidence at his trial.

His solicitor David Mclaughlin put it to jurors that his client had inadvertently downloaded files with CP or CPP in the titles, believing it to be related to his innocent search, but instead found the illegal images.

In the photos and videos that police were able to analyse children aged one to 15 were being abused.

The last video on the laptop – since deleted – had been viewed eight days before his arrest.

Police with a warrant to raid Soutar’s former home at Lomond Gardens, Methil, attended just after 8am on October 10 2019.

He was convicted of taking or making the files between December 2014 – when the hard drive was manufactured – and the date of his arrest.

In total, evidence of 1,117 of the worst category of videos and 88 of the most explicit images was found.