A 35-year-old man who admitted attempting to blackmail a woman but denies filming her in a toilet at West Suffolk Hospital has been warned he is likely to be jailed when he is sentenced next month.

Piotr Prasalek, of Pemberton Walk, Bury St Edmunds, was due to have been sentenced at Ipswich Crown Court on Tuesday (September 6) but the hearing had to be adjourned because his barrister is taking part in indefinite strike action by the Criminal Bar Association (CBA) over pay.

Adjourning the case until October 26, Judge Emma Peters warned Prasalek that she couldn’t see that he would be sentenced to anything but an immediate jail term.

She said the victim of the blackmail had worked at West Suffolk Hospital and had been devastated when she received a demand for £1,000 from Prasalek.

Prasalek pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to blackmail by making an unwarranted demand of £1,000 from a woman, but pleaded not guilty to a charge of voyeurism relating to allegedly filming her in a toilet at the Bury hospital.

At that hearing, Nicholas Bleaney, prosecuting, said the pleas to the charges were acceptable and he wouldn’t be asking for a trial on the voyeurism charge.

The court heard that although the voyeurism charge was not being pursued the installation of a hidden camera at the hospital was part and parcel of the blackmail.

The court heard that Prasalek had contacted the woman on social media to demand the money.

At the earlier hearing Charles Myatt for Prasalek, who has been in custody since March, said his client had no previous convictions and asked for a psychological report and a pre-sentence report to be prepared on him.

Mr Myatt said Prasalek had been "very short of money" at the time of the offence, which he described as being "doomed to fail".

He also said Prasalek suffered from depression and anxiety and was being investigated to see if he had Asperger's syndrome.