A man who campaigned to legalise sex between adults and children has been jailed for nine months for smuggling indecent photographs of youngsters into Britain.
Thomas O'Carroll (56), founding member and former head of the now defunct Paedophile Information Exchange, hid the pictures in albums labelled "household effects".
They were buried among his belongings which arrived at Heathrow Airport last October.
A jury at London's Southwark Crown Court last month rejected O'Carroll's defence that the pictures were "artistic street photography" and convicted him of three counts of knowingly importing the indecent images into Britain.
Judge Geoffrey Rivlin QC said although there was no evidence O'Carroll of Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, had interfered with the children, he had taken the photographs with his own camera "for his own sexual gratification".
"Indecent though those images may be, I don't believe that seen in isolation they would be regarded as especially sinister," he added.
"They do, however, become more sinister when seen against your background and long-standing expressed interest in and, it might be said, obsession with paedophilia."
O'Carroll was sentenced to nine months for each count to run concurrently.
PA