A PERVERT found guilty of secretly videoing a father and daughter in a swimming pool changing room has escaped jail. Kevin Bassett, 43, was given a community order by Judge John Plumstead: It is by good grace and good luck that you were not lynched that

A PERVERT found guilty of secretly videoing a father and daughter in a swimming pool changing room has escaped jail.

Kevin Bassett, 43, was given a community order by Judge John Plumstead: "It is by good grace and good luck that you were not lynched that day."

The angry father thought it was his four-year-old daughter that was being targeted, but gay Bassett confessed that it was the man he was interested in.

The father and his daughter had been swimming at the Grange Paddocks Pool in Bishop's Stortford when the man saw Bassett.

In a statement read to St Albans crown court the father said: "I noticed a middle aged male on a bench holding a plastic bag. I noticed a hole at an angle pointing towards myself and my daughter.

"I walked towards him. I could see a round circular shape through the hole. I had visions of my daughter being on the internet. I said to him: "Have you got a camera in there?" He said: "No, no."

"I was shaking and shouting."

The manager of the pool Lynne Crick told the jury that the father was shouting. She said: "He was very agitated. He said 'Can you come in here there is a bloke videoing my little girl?'"

Mrs Crick said in the changing room she saw Bassett with no clothes on holding a plastic bag in front of his private parts.

She said she called the police. When she was alone with

Bassett in her office he told her:

"I did have a video. It wasn't the little girl. It was the man I was interested in."

Bassett told her he had filmed in the pool once before, two weeks earlier. He said a video camera was hidden in one of the lockers.

Prosecutor Richard Jones told the jury of 10 men and two women that when police went to Bassett's home they seized video cassettes. He said: "The video cassettes showed men's genitalia and had been secretly recorded in a public place." He said there were more than 30 images.

Mr Jones went on: "We say the fact that the defendant possessed these covert images of men's private parts shows an inherent interest in this sort of thing.

"The defendant took himself to the male changing room with the intention of gaining images of male genitalia to gratify himself sexually."

Bassett, who worked with computers and at a care home, of Emblems, Dunmow, Essex pleaded not guilty to one charge of voyeurism on April 16, 2005. He was convicted by the jury.

Bassett, a practising Christian, told the jury he had lived with, and hidden his homosexuality for many years.

"It has made me ill over the years. I want to be like every one else."

The judge placed him on an 18 month community order. He also gave him a sexual offenders order for three years, put him on the sexual offenders register for five years and banned him from using a camera or recording equipment in public unless it is clearly on display.