POLICE who raided a man's home found a computer packed with pornographic pictures of children - including a six-week-old baby.

Magistrates at Harrogate, North Yorkshire, heard how detectives found the pictures when they raided the home of Timothy Sydney Pattison.

The swoop was carried out as part of Operation Ore, a worldwide crackdown on Internet child pornography spearheaded by the FBI.

The court was told how another picture showed a boy being subjected to male rape. There were other pictures of girls as young as five among those which Pattison, 32, of Forest Drive, Colburn, near Richmond, had downloaded, said Sarah Tyrer, prosecuting.

Pattison pleaded guilty to five charges of making an indecent photograph of a child between June 1 and November 13 last year.

Mrs Tyrer said the offences came to light as a result of Operation Ore's investigation into a website called Landslide in Fort Worth, Texas, from which credit card details were passed to police in the UK.

Pattison's details were among those found and when police raided his home to seize his computer he told them: "I know what you are here for."

A total of 52 indecent images of children all aged under 16 were found stored. Others had been deleted.

Mrs Tyrer said that when Pattison was interviewed he admitted subscribing with his credit card to websites where he could view adult pornography, while living with his parents.

In about 1999 he had seen an image of a five-year-old being raped and had reported the website to US Customs and cancelled his subscription.

Pattison told police he had gone looking for child porn to see what there was that he could report to the authorities, as he had done on an earlier occasion.

He had deliberately clicked on child images and had downloaded 200 before he deleted them. It had begun out of curiosity, but it had gone on for three years.

The amount of time Pattison spent on his computer had been the main reason why he and his wife had split up.

Defence solicitor Stuart Berry did not object to a prosecution suggestion that sentencing should be by a Crown Court judge. Court chairman Pauline Ward bailed Pattison to appear at Leeds Crown Court on a date to be fixed.