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A jobless fan of Japanese anime has become the first in Britain to be convicted of having illegal pictures of cartoon children.

Robul Hoque, 39, made legal history after he was dragged before the courts after police discovered a stash of of explicit Manga-style pictures on his computer.

Hoque, of Hardwick Road, South Bank, Middlesbrough, became a 'test case' after officers seized his computer from his home on June 13, 2012.

On the hard drive they found 288 still and 99 moving images - none of which were of real people.

Despite being cartoons, they were classified as prohibited images as they depicted young girls, some in school uniforms, some exposing themselves or taking part in sexual activity.

Teeside Crown Court heard how experts also discovered Hoque had been searching for cartoon images of young girls on the internet.

He denied 20 charges of possessing prohibited images of children and was due to stand trial this week.

But he pleaded guilty to 10 specimen charges. The other 10 were left to lie on the court file.

Defending him, his barrister Richard Bennett said the case should send a warning to "thousands" of other Anime fans across the UK.

He said: "This case should serve as a warning to every Manga and Anime fan to be careful. It seems there are many thousands of people in this country, if they are less then careful, who may find themselves in that position too.”

Hoque denied a separate charge of failing to notify police of a string of online usernames, but he was cleared of this as prosecutors offered no evidence.

The Evening Gazette reported that six years ago he was prosecuted for having “Tomb Raider-style” computer-generated pictures of fictional children.

They were so realistic, a jury convicted him on six counts of making “indecent pseudo-photographs” of children, which he had denied.

That too was the first case of its kind in the country. At the time, a judge told him he “crossed the line as to what is illegal” and those pictures could be “a door into a very murky and distasteful world”.

He was given a community order and completed a sex offender treatment programme after the 2008 conviction.

The former student and office worker had hundreds of “Manga Japanese style” pictures at that time, but they were not made illegal until 2010.

Mr Bennett said: “On two occasions now he’s been a test case. This is a test case because he’s the only person as far as I’m aware who has appeared for possession singly of these sorts of images.”

Despite claiming some of the images appeared on a legitimate website, Hoque, who lived with and cared for his mother, was given a nine month suspended sentence.

On issuing the suspended sentence, Judge Tony Briggs warned Hoque that if the images had depicted real people, a jail sentence "measured in years" would have been appropriate.

He said: "This is material that clearly society and the public can well do without. Its danger is that it obviously portrays sexual activity with children, and the more it’s portrayed, the more the ill-disposed may think it’s acceptable.”