A Catholic priest has avoided being sent to jail after pleading guilty to having more than 3,000 child porn images.

Paul Clarke, 71, now of Urmston, Manchester, but formerly of Watchbell Road, Rye, East Sussex, was sentenced to an eight-month prison sentence suspended for two years at Lewes Crown Court.

He had admitted one charge of possession of an indecent image of a child, another of possession of prohibited images, and three counts of making a total of 3,100 indecent images of children.

A Sussex Police spokesman said: "All the offences involved images taken from the internet. There is no evidence of contact offending and none of the images are of local children."

Police officers executed a search warrant at Clarke's Rye address, the residential presbytery attached to St Anthony's Church, on November 13 2014, and seized computers and related material.

The force spokesman said: "He will be a registered sex offender for 10 years and was given a Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO) to last indefinitely, severely restricting his access to computers.

"The prosecution followed an intelligence-led investigation by the Paedophile Online Investigation Team of Sussex Police."

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.