A GWENT disc jockey was jailed for two-and-a-half years yesterday after admitting "horrendous" internet child pornography offences.

Former pirate and regional BBC DJ Alan Fossey's computer contained words and images detailing the sexual abuse, torture, mutilation and murder of young children.

Sentencing Fossey at Cardiff crown court, Judge Stephen Hopkins, QC, said: "What I have seen and read in this case is among some of the worst I have ever seen."

Fossey, 58, of Broad Street, Blaenavon, had admitted two counts of publishing articles under the Obscene Publications Act, two charges of distributing indecent images of children and 23 counts of making indecent images of children.

Caroline Rees, prosecuting, said Fossey had written and published on the internet more than two million "depraved" words under the title of A Pervert's Story.

Officers were alerted to Fossey's conduct after a British family living in the south of France, who were known to Fossey, discovered their names and those of their children in the document after performing a Google search of their family name. Subsequent investigations uncovered 4,405 indecent images of children, some of them young babies, on Fossey's computer.

The offences were committed between July 2003 and September 2005.

Fossey told police he had an obsessive compulsive disorder regarding his collection of the images, and he likened his behaviour to stamp collecting.

Judge Hopkins, QC, added "The degradation, abuse and exploitation of the young children in these images almost defies description.

"It is people like you who fuel this evil trade in child pornography and the abuse suffered by these children."

Fossey asked for 109 similar offences to be considered. He was ordered to register as a sex offender for a period of ten years.

He was also banned from using the internet, owning a computer or having any unsupervised contact with children for the next ten years.

Outside the court, Gary Probert, the operational head of Gwent Police's High-Tech Crime Unit, told the Argus: "I have never come across anything as horrendous as this for filth and depravity."

A Gwent Police statement said Fossey's detailed descriptions of abuse were so horrific that experienced FBI computer investigators who assisted in the collection of the material were distressed by what they found.