Photographs of a man accused of creating child pornography were found in the same computer folders as images of underage girls, the Supreme Court heard yesterday.

Lauren Bell, a police analyst, told the court that several recorded Skype conversations were also found on the laptop.

While one appeared to show the defendant in a conversation with a witness in the case using a Skype account under his own name, others appeared to involve an account witnesses had linked to the self-proclaimed hacker who had blackmailed them into exposing themselves.

The defendant, a 30-year-old man from St George’s, has denied a string of offences, including extortion, making child pornography, accessing child pornography and distributing child pornography.

Neither he nor the claimants in the case can be identified for legal reasons.

Two witnesses had told the court that they were contacted by a purported hacker on Facebook, who demanded that they provide sexual material to him or he would release materials he already had on them on social media.

Both witnesses, who were under the age of 16 at the time, said that they complied with the demands, only for the materials to be released in 2015 when they cut contact with the blackmailer.

As the trial continued yesterday, the jury were shown censored images from several Skype recordings recovered from a laptop.

Ms Bell told the court that the Skype recordings were made using a programme that recorded everything on the laptop screen.

One recording showed a conversation between the defendant, using a Skype account under his own name, and one of the witnesses with no objectionable material shown.

A second recording, found on the same laptop folder, showed the witness in a Skype conversation with an unseen individual using an account linked to the blackmailer.

During the conversation, the blackmailer’s account instructed the witness to remove her clothes and pose for the camera.

Images from two similar videos were also shown. In one recording, the laptop user temporarily minimised Skype, revealing the laptop background.

Ms Bell said that the laptop background, a desert scene, appeared to be similar to that seen in the first video, which included the defendant using a Skype account with his own name.

Under cross-examination by Elizabeth Christopher, counsel for the defendant, Ms Bell said that the laptop password had not been changed since December 2013.

She told the court that she was able to look at the creation date, last access date and last modification date of the files on the laptop, including the images and videos of child pornography.

Ms Bell agreed that if a file is copied from one device to another, the creation date of the file on the new device would be the date the file was copied.

She also accepted that while the access date of a file usually indicates the last time a file is moved, opened or viewed, anti-virus scans can also cause the access date to be updated.

The trial continues.

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