A PERVERT who helped to run a worldwide paedophile network is facing a lengthy prison sentence after confessing to a string of crimes.

Former serviceman Paul Hagan was yesterday described in court as “the administrator” for a website which distributed photographs of child abuse.

Organisers of the site were said at an earlier hearing to have amassed a collection of more than a million indecent pictures and film clips of children.

A loner who acted as the “librarian” of the ring was jailed indefinitely in August 2008 after a judge branded him “a very dangerous individual”.

Computer expert Philip Thompson, 27, from Stockton, was one of more than 50 suspects held after a joint investigation by police in London and Teesside.

Hagan, of The Wynd, Pelton, Chester-le-Street, County Durham, has since been arrested, and appeared at Teesside Crown Court yesterday.

The 46-year-old pleaded guilty to 15 specimen charges of making indecent photographs of children in March, April and May, 2008.

He also admitted possessing almost 15,000 images of child abuse, and distributing 4,390 pictures between October 2006 and February 2008.

Tim Parkin, mitigating, told Judge Michael Taylor: “The defendant knows that he will go prison for these offences.”

Hagan was given bail to an address in the West Midlands until he returns to Durham Crown Court to be sentenced on a date to be fixed.

Mr Parkin said his client was about to lose his Pelton home after falling behind with mortgage payments, but has somewhere else to live.

“The defendant has no convictions, he is a man of exemplary record,” said Mr Parkin.

“He has been many years in the services.

Hagan was yesterday ordered to sign on the sex offenders’ register by Judge Taylor, who told him: “You must understand that custody is inevitable.”

In 2008, Judge Taylor told Thompson that he will be freed from prison only when he is no longer considered to be a risk to the public.

Police raided his Gooseport Road home in February of that year after infiltrating the gang during the biggest undercover operation of its kind.

During their analysis of Thompson’s equipment, officers learned that he not only distributed to others, but also took some of the photographs himself.

When he was quizzed, jobless Thompson gave the names of some of the other paedophiles he traded images with, and 360 suspects were identified. It emerged after Thompson’s case that 15 children had been “safeguarded”

in the UK as a result of the ongoing investigation, which spans 33 countries.