He won’t be charged over vile images

ROLF Harris’s home computer contained a secret stash of child pornography images, it can now be revealed.

Police found the vile material after the entertainer was arrested on suspicion of indecently assaulting girls as young as seven.

The Crown Prosecution Service wanted to try Harris for possessing the indecent images but yesterday dropped the charges amid fears that it could be seen as oppressive following his jailing for the assaults.

Harris’s computer contained images of children under 13 posi ng suggestively while seminaked, with teddy bears in the foreground.

Detectives found a total of 33 indecent photographs of boys and girls downloaded from child pornography websites.

Harris also regularly viewed adult pornography – police found nearly 500 erotic images from more than 300 sites. Four per cent of his computer viewing related to teenage porn with Harris clicking on images which

Notes in his diary

included very young girls naked from the waist down.

In many cases, Harris returned to the same pictures over and over again after carefully deleting them from his browsing history. He even kept a note in his diary of instructions on how to delete them from his computer.

Harris was charged in August 2013 with four counts of making indecent images of children after police discovered he had downloaded images between June and July 2012 – months before he was questioned under caution in November 2012 on suspicion of indecent assault.

But the jury was not told of his sordid pornography collection – kept on an Apple Mac used by other family members of his family – after Harris’s lawyer Simon Ray produced evidence in the form of ID cards that he claimed showed the girls in the images were over 18.

In legal arguments in the jury’s absence, Sasha Wass, QC, prosecuting, was forced to agree to separate the four child pornography charges from the indecent assault trial. Miss Wass said: ‘They are almost certainly going to say girls viewed were overage, anything other than that would be compliant in a criminal offence. They are extremely young girls, underage girls in pornographic poses.’

Harris admitted l ooking at adult erotic material online when questioned by police but denied downloading child porn.

He insisted any such images found their way on to his hard drive by mistake when he was clicking from one site to another.

‘The key point here is these were not deliberately sought out,’ Mr Ray said. He accepted there was a ‘ huge amount’ of adult pornography on Harris’s computer, with his client regularly viewing adult sites.

He argued that the charges should be dropped because the indecent images were ‘wholly and unfairly out of context’ in relation to years of downloading thousands of adult pornography

A BBC radio presenter claimed that Harris’s interest in pictures of naked children dated back to the 1970s.

Jeff Cooper recalled Harris showing off six images of naked children aged between four and nine at a canteen of Radio Clyde in Glasgow between November 1978 and April 1979.

However, his testimony was not put before the jury.