Vernon Coaker, a Home Office minister, announced that the Government plans to make the possession and viewing of violent images or rape and sexual torture a criminal offence. Anyone caught possessing such images faces a three year jail sentence.

The move follows a campaign by Liz Longhurst, whose daughter Jane, 21, a special needs teacher, was killed in 2003.

Graham Coutts, a musician convicted of her murder, has won an appeal against his conviction and is facing a possible retrial. The trial was told that he kept Ms Longhurst's body in a storage unit for 35 days during which he visited the unit ten times. Ms Longhurst's death took place just hours after Coutts, 36, viewed sexually violent internet porn sites, his trial was told.

Mrs Longhurst from Berkshire said: “My daughter, Sue, and myself are very pleased that after 30 months of intensive campaigning we have persuaded the Government to take action against these horrific internet sites which can have such a corrupting influence and glorify extreme sexual violence.”

Mr Coaker said: “ The vast majority of people find these forms of violent and extreme pornography deeply abhorrent. This sort of material is not just offensive it contains images of sexual acts and sexual violence that are already illegal to publish or distribute in the UK.

"Such material has no place in our society but the advent of the internet has meant that this material is more easily available and means existing controls are being by-passed - we must move to tackle this.”

The proposed ban, which it is expected will be included in legislation introduced in the next session of Parliament, would send a strong message that possession of the mateiral is totally unacceptable, Mr Coaker said.

He said a new offence would ban the possession of porn depicting “scenes of extreme sexual violence” and other obscene material such as bestiality and necrophilia. It would cover, for example, violence that is - or appears to be - life-threatening or is likely to result in “serious and disabling injury”.

The move will cover porn both online and offline. Currently it is an offence to publish and distribute such material, but not an offence to possess it.

Under today's proposals the maximum penalty for publication, distribution and possession for gain of obscene pornography is to be increased from three to five years imprisonment.

A Home Office spokesman said the new law was not intended to target people who accidentally come into contact with obscene pornography, and nor would it hit the mainstream adult entertainment industry which works within current obscenity laws.

Jim Gamble, Chief executive of the new Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, said legislation would only be truly effective if it develops step by step with technological advances.

“The proposed new offence starts to answer that need in respect of how the internet can be used to supplement this area of criminality”.

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