A paedophile is refusing to reveal the access code to a secure folder found on one of his phones, a court heard. Police have been unable to get into the secret file to see what it contains, but have found messages in which Mattie Tomassen makes references to having images stored in it.
Swansea Crown Court heard that the defendant has previously been jailed for possession of indecent images, and sending him back to prison a judge said it was the "unhealthy, degenerate, and lustful demands" of people like him which were fuelling the sexual abuse of children.
Arrest and investigation
Alexandra Wilson, prosecuting, told the court that in June last year the defendant was sentenced to eight months in prison and made subject to a sexual harm prevention order for possession of indecent images - she said as part of that order Tomassen was required to register internet-enabled devices with the police, and to give them access to the devices when requested.
The barrister said that acting on intelligence, police went to the defendant's accommodation in Carmarthen on March 19 this year and arrested him on suspicion of possession of indecent images. Tomassen's Motorola phone was seized and he gave officers the PIN to unlock it.
The court heard officers examined the phone and found no images. However, they did find a secure folder on the device which required a separate code to open it. The defendant refused to reveal the code and said he thought the file may have been pre-installed on the machine when he bought it, and said he had never used it. After being questioned he was released under investigation.
The court heard police subsequently went to the Argos store in Carmarthen where the defendant bought the phone, and the company confirmed they only sold new devices and did not deal in reconditioned ones.
Second phone and further evidence
The prosecutor said police have been unable to get into the locked file on the defendant's device but did find messages in the phone's chat log where 34-year-old Tomassen told a contact "This looks like one in my secure folder".
The court heard that the defendant was arrested again on July 9 after risk management e-Safe monitoring software installed on another phone he owned alerted police to the fact that he had accessed the social media platform X - formerly Twitter - on multiple occasions and viewed child abuse material.
The defendant answered "no comment" to all questions asked in his subsequent interview but did give police the PIN to his phone. The prosecutor said a forensic examination of the device found 12 images of young boys being sexually abused, including two in the most serious Category A showing rape. The court heard that the images were inaccessible - being either deleted or in the cache - but would at some stage have been accessible.
Sentencing
Mattie Tomassen, of Furnace Bank, Carmarthen, had previously pleaded guilty to breaching a sexual harm prevention order, and to possession of indecent images of categories A, B and C when he returned to the dock for sentencing. He has two previous convictions for six offences including possession of indecent images from June 2025 - the offences which gave rise to the sexual harm prevention order - and threatening to destroy property from December last year. The last conviction related to Tomassen telling a community psychiatric nurse that he was planning to go to police headquarters and smash up cars, and telling the nurse he would rather be in prison than on the streets.
Matt Murphy, for Tomassen, said there was a detailed pre-sentence report before the court which explored his client's history of drug and alcohol misuse. He said at the time of the offending Tomassen had found himself "socially isolated", and he invited the court to pass a sentence which would allow probation officers to work with the defendant in the community.
Judge Huw Rees said Tomassen had wilfully refused to reveal the access code to the locked folder, and he said while the number of images found on a second phone had not been great the reality was that people who show an interest in such material fuel the demand for child abuse. He told the defendant that the children in the images on his phone were real youngsters somewhere in the world being sexually abused in order to satisfy the "unhealthy, degenerate, and lustful demands" of people like him.
With one-third discounts for his guilty pleas Tomassen was sentenced to a total of 26 months in prison comprising 14 months for possession of the indecent images, and 12 months for breaching the sexual harm prevention order to run consecutively. The defendant will serve up to half the sentence in custody before being released on licence to serve the remainder in the community.
Tomassen was also made subject to a new 10-year sexual harm prevention order, and will be a registered sex offender for the same length of time.
