A man jailed for stealing a yacht and sailing 70 miles across the Moray Firth to evade the police was back in court yesterday.
Cathal Mathew was locked up for 19 months in March for stealing a car and 24ft boat Tradewind.
The 29-year-old was on a community payback order at the time of sentencing, after admitting he had downloaded indecent images of children at his home and that he had more than 20 hours of footage of extreme pornography.
But since he is locked up, he has been unable to carry out the order – and yesterday, it was revoked and transferred into a six-month sentence.
Mathew, who has links to Elgin and Huntly, was also put on the sex offenders’ register for seven years.
Fiscal depute Stephanie Ross told Aberdeen Sheriff Court that police had received a tip-off that an IP address registered to Mathew’s wife had been linked to indecent images of children, prompting them to search the property.
She said Mathew admitted being the user of the computer equipment seized, and when investigations were carried out police found 65 indecent videos of children and 26 photos.
The ranged from level one to level five – the most explicit.
Officers also discovered 100 videos and 448 photos which depicted adults involved with sexual activities with animals.
The offences took place between March 28, 2011 and November 14, 2013.
Representing the dad-of-one, solicitor advocate George Mathers said his client’s repeat offending was as a result of him “living in a fantasy world”.
And he urged the sheriff to deal with the sex offences near the end of Mathew’s current sentence to allow him to undertake a fresh order when he is released from prison.
But Sheriff William Summers argued there was clear evidence he had not been complying with the social work team even before he was jailed for stealing the yacht.
He sentenced him to six months, which will run concurrently to his existing sentence.
Mathew stole the Tradewind from Portknockie’s tiny harbour while on-the-run from police after he stole a car from Inverurie.
He made it as far as the waters off Caithness before panicking setting off a distress flare.
He was eventually arrested five days later after being picked by an offshore standby boat and brought back to shore in Fraserburgh.
