A child rapist who filmed his horrifying abuse of victims and made videos of it for others to watch was jailed for 10 years today.
Robert McGregor, 36, preyed on youngsters he groomed and exploited for 13 years.
He was caught with a cache of child pornography by police which led them to identify three victims he had sexually assaulted.
A judge told McGregor: “Your sexual offending is of the most serious and appalling nature.”
Lady Carmichael pointed out that the predator had formed relationships with families in order to gain access to children who he then subjected to abuse.
She said that McGregor’s youngest victim was “extremely vulnerable”.
The judge said that the material recovered in the case not only demonstrated what he had done but that he had persisted in it despite the obvious distress of victims.
Lady Carmichael told McGregor that she would have jailed him for 15 years but for his early guilty pleas to the catalogue of offences.
The judge also ordered that he be kept under supervision for a further five years on his release.
Lady Carmichael said she was not satisfied that the risk criteria were met for imposing a life sentence on McGregor under an Order for Lifelong Restriction.
One man branded McGregor an “animal” as he was led off to start his sentence.
The child abuser’s home at Friars Street, in Inverness, was raided by police in May last year and laptops and other items were seized for analysis.
More than 2000 indecent photos and 899 videos were recovered many of which were found to contain materiel at the most extreme level of abuse.
McGregor, a delivery driver, had uploaded five videos to a peer to peer internet app which allowed others to view the footage of his abuse of one of his victims.
Police computer experts found that the files had been accessed by users in America, Germany and in the Czech Republic.
His sex assaults on children spanned more than a decade between 2001 and 2014 and all the attacks occurred in the Inverness area. His youngest victim was aged just three.
His youngest victim was aged just three. Another boy was subjected to nearly a decade of abuse from the age of six and the third child victim was 12 when McGregor assaulted him.
The child pornography offences took place between 2011 and March last year.