AN award-winning butcher has been placed on the sex offenders' register for two years and ordered to carry out 100 hours of unpaid work in the community for being in possession of indecent images of children.

Jonathan Crombie, 45, of Duddingston View, whose family's shop in Edinburgh's Broughton Street, is famous for the high quality of its products admitted at an earlier Edinburgh Sheriff Court appearance of downloading the images on a computer in the shop between September 5, 2005, and January 17 last year.

The court heard previously that a computer seized by police held 71 still images and 15 movies, but only one image was accessible. Another piece of equipment, a hard-drive, contained 69 movies, but all were inaccessible.

Defence solicitor, Mark Harrower, told Sheriff Nigel Ross that Crombie had deleted the images himself and the hard-drive images had been inaccessible because of the age of the equipment. The lawyer also said the images were at the lower end of the scale of child pornography.

He pointed out that his client had no previous convictions of any kind.

"Mr Crombie has suffered greatly because of this," said Mr Harrower. "He has resigned from the company for which he has worked for 30 years, having started as a child. He has also apologised to the staff."

Sheriff Ross told Crombie there were mitigating circumstances. The number of images was very low, many of them were beyond his ability to access and they were not shared by anyone. Most important, the report said he presented no danger to children and no serious risk to the community.