A FORMER soldier who admitted making indecent photographs of young children on his computer has been spared jail.

Philip Thorpe was traced by a specialist unit at New Scotland Yard, which was carrying out investigations into indecent pictures on the Internet.

Deborah Sherwin, prosecuting, told Teesside Crown Court that officers were referred to one website address where files were being swapped, and discovered that images with sexually explicit titles had been viewed.

They traced Thorpe to an address at Allenbrooke Barracks, in Topcliffe, Thirsk, North Yorkshire.

The case was passed to North Yorkshire Police, and officers raided the defendant's home on May 14 last year, seizing a computer.

Thirty indecent images and five indecent film clips were found on the hard drive and in three CD-roms.

Miss Sherwin said 37-year-old Thorpe admitted downloading pornographic material, but that he said it was "nothing dodgy".

Later, he said he looked at some sites containing indecent images of children because he was curious.

Thorpe, a former Royal Artillery man who served in Iraq in 2002, admitted five counts of making indecent images of children. Two charges of possessing indecent images were allowed to lie on file.

Rod Hunt, for Thorpe, now of Harris Road, Lincoln, said he was a man of previous good character who had fallen victim to morbid curiosity.

Judge Peter Armstrong said he accepted the images were at the lower end of the scale and that they had not been distributed to other people.

The judge said he would not jail Thorpe, believing the community would be better served by him joining a sex offenders' course.

He also gave him a three-year community rehabilitation order, ordered him to register as a sex offender for five years and pay £300 costs.