ENGLAND — A 32-year-old British man has become the first U.K. citizen to be sentenced for downloading computer-generated child pornography.Robul Hoque was convicted on six counts of possessing obscene images of children and cleared on three that he manufactured virtual child-porn images. The convictions stemmed from “tens of thousands of images” police found on Hoque’s hard drive in October 2006. According to reports, the images ranged from crude illustrations and cartoons to complex graphics. Many were part of an illustrated story about child abuse.

The jury described the convicted images as “so realistic, they looked like photographs.”

At sentencing, Judge Peter Bowers told Hoque the images “effectively crossed the line as to what is illegal and what is lawfully permitted,” even though Hoque “had no contact at all with any children.

“This may be on the fringes of it but it’s still an entrance, a door into a very murky and distasteful world,” the judge said.

He also noted that the majority of the images seized by police were “fairly distasteful and disgusting, but perfectly lawful” because they were “almost comic strips.”

Hoque was sentenced to 18 months of community service and supervision and ordered to attend an internet sex offenders’ treatment program. He will appear on the U.K.’s sex offender list for five years, but he was not barred from working with children.

“The sentence is appropriate for the circumstances,” Forensic computer analyst Ray Savage, who served as an expert witness for the prosecution during the trial, told GazetteLive.co.uk. “But what we mustn’t lose sight of is that the nature of this material feeds the furnaces and, in my experience, leads on to people accessing more graphic images.”