A JUDGE has jailed a man for possessing thousands of indecent pictures and videos of children, some of which depicted babies and toddlers.

His Honour Judge Chris Smith said Tahir Mansley’s offending was “just too serious” to merit a suspended sentence particularly when he embarked on a series of sexualised conversations with a 14-year-old boy whilst under investigation by police.

The teenager turned out to be an undercover police officer acting as a decoy.

Mansley, 27, of Bewerley Crescent, Bradford, is now beginning a 25-month prison sentence. He will also have to sign the sex offenders register for 10 years.

Prosecutor Adam Walker told Bradford Crown Court how police raided Mansley’s home address in June 2022 after an investigation revealed illegal images had been uploaded to Snapchat over the previous year.

He was arrested and several electronic items were discovered when his house was searched including a computer tower stack which, when examined by a digital forensic investigator, was found to contain “a high volume” of more than 5,000 illegal pictures and videos of children.

The age range of the children pictured spanned babies and toddlers as well as teenagers up to 16 or 17 years old.

Some prohibited images were also found as well as specialist software that could recover deleted files.

Among the images and videos recovered were 540 in Category A, the most serious.

In an interview, Mansley gave a prepared statement in which he admitted possessing the images and said he was suffering from ADHD. He answered no questions.

Between March 27 and April 4 this year Mansley, who had been under investigation from June 2022, instigated a conversation with what he believed to be was a 14-year-old boy.

The boy was actually an undercover police officer.

In an initially “innocuous” exchange Mansley told the boy that he was “cute”. He later asked him for a picture and asked if he had “ever done anything with lads or girls”. When the conversation moved to Snapchat it became a one-to-one communication between the two.

That conversation included questions about the sexual appetites of teenagers, sexual preferences, and the size of the boy’s penis. He sent the boy a picture of his own penis.

Mansley was interviewed in May 2024 but exercised his right to silence.

He later pleaded guilty before a scheduled trial to multiple counts of possession of indecent images, and attempted communication with a child in a sexual manner.

Mitigating, Rodney Ferm said Mansley, who had no previous convictions and who had been in custody since June this year, would benefit from support to address his behaviour and prevent further offending.

He urged the court to impose a suspended sentence so that Mansley could be “shown a different way”.

Judge Smith said there was a degree of sophistication to Mansley’s offending, which had taken place over a long period of time, due to the specialist software he had used.

He told Mansley, who appeared via video link from HMP Leeds, that his offending was aggravated by the very large number of pictures and videos found on his devices, the sophistication of the set-up, and the young age of those in the images.

“I want you to understand that the camera that took those images was capturing real sexual abuse, and that has lasting effects upon people," the judge said.

He pointed out that Mansley’s conversations with the teenage boy had occurred when he was already under investigation by the police.

He said: “You should have been keeping yourself out of trouble. You did not.

“There was no 14-year-old child, but you did not know that, and you were soliciting images nonetheless.”

He jailed Mansley for a total of 25 months and imposed a ten-year sexual harm prevention order “to manage the risk that I am worried you pose.”

He also ordered the forfeiture and destruction of the electronic devices seized from Mansley’s home.