Man ‘provided service’ to turn photos of children into depraved images

Hugh Nelson, 27, created a huge number of images showing children in graphic sexual detail including bestiality, beheadings, rape and other violent scenarios from his bedroom in Egerton.

Bolton Crown Court heard how in May 2023 he had offered to create a range of images for a man, who was in fact an undercover police officer, he had been talking to online for a fee of £80.

Prosecutor David Toal said: “He stated ‘I’ve done beatings, smotherings, hangings, drownings, beheadings, necro, beast, the list goes on’ with a laughing emoji.’”

Mr Toal told the court how Nelson’s crimes were uncovered by a police investigation, dubbed “Operation Influence”, into “the creation and developing trends of AI in relation to child sexual exploitation.”

Nelson had claimed to work with the software DAZ 3-D and told the undercover officer he was “taking commissions” from people.

The case was heard at Bolton Crown Court (Image: Newsquest)

Nelson told him he had created over 60,000 “characters” using the software, whose ages ranged from six months to middle age.

He sent eight images to the officer, seven of them showing graphic images of child sexual activity.

On May 10 that year Nelson sent him an image he was working on of a baby girl in a nursery being abused by a man.

Two days later he sent him six further computer-generated images of the baby girl being abused in various ways.

He later sent him a link to a cloud storage folder with 299 images of children being raped or sexually abused.

Nelson had told the officer that since most people could not sexually abuse their “niece or daughter” he believed “the way I see it, I provide a valuable service”.

Mr Toal said: “This was followed by a smiling emoji with a halo.”

But in June of that year, police arrested Nelson at his home on Briggs Fold Road, Egerton, and he admitted he felt his “mind was corrupted”.

He also admitted that he had a sexual interest mainly in girls around 12.

Further devices seized from Nelson showed that he had been talking to grown adults online “regarding the rape and sexual exploitation of children”.

He was found to have spoken with a man in Italy in June 2021 about a nine-year-old girl in highly explicit sexualised terms and to have asked for pictures of her.

The man commissioned Nelson to create an image of the girl “being kidnapped in a van and raped”.

Nelson also exchanged messages about abusing an underaged girl in France and appeared to graphically encourage the man at the other end to abuse her.

He then exchanged similar messages about a nine-year-old girl in America and was “commissioned” to create images of her in sexual scenes.

Mr Toal said that Nelson had also tried to incite a 15-year-old he was speaking to online, also in America, to sexual activity and asked for sexual images.

While searching Nelson’s devices, the police also found various indecent images, some of them he had distributed to other people online.

These included 56 of the most serious or “category A” images, with 16 category B and 47 category C images.

Nelson was found to have had a total of 1,391 prohibited images and was arrested again in September 2023.

For the first set of crimes, involving his talks with the undercover officer, he pleaded guilty to four counts of distributing indecent images of children and to publishing an obscene article.

For the second set he eventually pleaded guilty to three counts of encouraging offences, in each case the rape of a child under 13, and to attempting to incite a child under 16 to sex.

Nelson also admitted to three counts of distributing indecent photographs of children, three counts of making indecent images of children and possessing prohibited images of children.

Bob Elias, defending, said that this was the first case he had ever seen in which pornography was “tailor-made, bespoke” which Nelson used his Masters Degree skills to create.

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He accepted that Nelson “to please his customers, created monstrous images of depravity“.

But Mr Elias told the court that Nelson was a “shy, gauche” young man who “in his lonely bedroom life” gained a sense of “social validation” from what he was doing.

He said: “The whole activity smacks of manipulation and role play by some cruel and nasty people on this defendant.”

Mr Elias said that as far as the court knew, no actual children had been abused while Nelson was “living on takeaways paid for by making those vile images”.

The Honorary Recorder for Bolton Judge Martin Walsh said this was a “difficult, troubling case” and ordered Nelson to be brought back to learn his fate on Monday, October 28.

Source – INDIA TV