Councillor admits posting pornography on his Twitter account

A SENIOR councillor has admitted posting pornographic images on his Twitter account – which had the handle @Satan666Lord.

Steve Bayes, whose Twitter account name was Lord of Darkness, told Hull Crown Court he kept the images in a desktop folder Steven Pictures/Despicable to post onto Twitter.

“It was primarily porn, but not exclusively and I wasn’t the only person who posted onto it,” he added.

Mr Bayes, 56, said it “wasn’t violent porn particularly.”

Asked to explain, he said: “There would be images maybe of somebody tying, imaginative rope tying around a torso that would come out in the shape of a pentagram.”

However Mr Bayes, a nurse at Hull Royal Infirmary and Hull Council Cabinet member until his suspension in 2016, said he “never” posted extreme images on Twitter “and didn’t have a reason to download them”.

Mr Bayes denies two counts of making indecent photographs of children and one of possessing extreme pornographic images. The indecent and extreme images originated from two iPads, which were backed up onto his laptop and only revealed during a forensic examination.

He said one had been handed back to a former employer in 2014. When police raided his home in August 2016, the other iPad was in a flat upstairs. Neither has been recovered. He hadn’t told officers where the second iPad was because the police didn’t ask for it. “I didn’t offer it to them, as it was a shared device as was the laptop,” he added.

If he had known there were indecent images he “would probably have dropped it into the sea off a North Sea Ferry. It’s like kryptonite – you don’t want anything to do with it”.

A man he knew had access to his devices, who told him he and some of his friends had viewed extreme images on his laptop.

The case continues.