A vile pervert who spent 18 years collecting more than 45,800 sick images of children as young as four being abused, is facing jail.

Simon Luby appeared at Kilmarnock Sheriff Court yesterday (Monday, April 29) and admitted to hiding the vile haul between various electronic devices in his former Whitehirst Park home.

The court heard the 45-year-old married dad-of-two was a Global Director for K2 – an international windfarm company, but in his spare time he was secretly amassing a horrific collection of child porn, spanning almost two decades.

Thousands of the images and videos were classed in the most depraved category A. The rest were in Category C and B.

Police raided Luby’s home in Kilwinning, at 7am on July 23 last year, whilst his children slept upstairs, following a tip off that indecent images had been shared from that address.

Fiscal depute Kirsty Urquhart said: “Police found a number of electronic devices at the home, including laptops, hard drives, mobile phones and an iPod.

“At 9.18am the accused approached two police officers and said ‘If you find anything in there it will be on those two’, pointing to a Toshiba Hard drive and a black Thinkpad laptop.”

Police Scotland’s Cyber Crime Unit then descended on Luby’s home and analysed files on all his electronic devices and found images and videos dating back to September 2000 right up to his arrest in July 2018.

In total police discovered 45,825 disgusting images and 458 videos of children, mostly small girls aged between four and 14, being abused.

The court heard 41,899 still images were found on the Toshiba hard drive of which 1,226 were in the worst category A, 1,358 were category B and 38,802 were category C.

Police then found 458 child sex videos of which 227 were category A, 32 were category B and 199 were category C.

A further 1,864 images were found on a USB stick with even more being discovered on the Thinkpad laptop.

Following the discovery of the shocking haul, police arrested Luby.

He told police: “I’m not a danger to kids or anything. This has nothing to do with my wife or kids.

“I think I have autism and once I start something I can’t stop. I think there’s been a great deal of stupidity.”

Defending Luby, Gordon Ghee said his client had lost his job and his wife had left him after his seedy secret was uncovered, adding: “He is living with his parents and currently has no contact with his children as a result of this.”

Sheriff Elizabeth McFarlane warned: “I’m going to allow your bail to continue, but be under no illusions, given the vast number of images that you have downloaded, custody is upmost in my mind. You might want to get your affairs in order before you return to see me for sentencing.”

Luby will return to court later this month.