A DOCTOR who worked in a children's intensive care unit has been thrown out of the profession for downloading child porn.

Dr Carl Pritchard, 36, who used to live in Sherwold Close, Lower Stratton, was arrested by police acting on a tip-off from the FBI after he used his credit card to access depraved US websites.

Detectives arrested the doctor as part of an investigation into internet paedophiles, the General Medical Council heard yesterday.

Experts who analysed his computer found Pritchard had a number of files with explicit titles including three that suggested adults having sex with girls. Pritchard, an anaesthetist in the paediatric intensive care unit at Southampton General Hospital, claimed at first a virus must have put the indecent images on his computer.

But the disgraced medic later pleaded guilty to seven charges of attempting to make an indecent photograph of a child at Swindon Crown Court on June 7 last year.

He was spared jail when a judge imposed a two-year community rehabilitation order and ordered him to sign the sex offenders register for five years.

Stephen Brassington, for the GMC, said that in 1999 Pritchard had used his credit card to access a site called Nude Teens via US-based Landslide Productions Inc.

Pritchard was arrested at the hospital on May 21, 2003, and later suspended from his job. Experts who analysed his computers discovered Pritchard had been involved in a cyber newsgroup that dealt with erotic images of girls aged between 13 and 17.

Of the 275 messages from the group, 15 had been opened by Pritchard, said Mr Brassington.

The attached picture files included titles such as 'horny children'.

Pritchard, of Shirley, Southampton, Hants, did not appear at the hearing in London yesterday.

Chairman Mr Kenneth Robb said: 'The panel consider this type of offence extremely serious. They undermine public confidence in the medical profession and damage its reputation. Dr Pritchard's name will be erased from the medical register."