Rolf Harris child abuse images stash ‘found under floorboards by plumber 40 years ago’
Claims come after CPS drops charges over child porn records found on Harris’s computer
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Rolf Harris’s plumber has reportedly claimed he discovered a stash of child abuse images under the floorboards of the entertainer’s home 40 years ago.
The plumber, who apparently panicked at the time and put the illegal images back, was one of the first people to come forward with claims about Harris in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal.
According to the Mirror, the man found the collection of pictures of underage girls at Harris’s former property in Sydenham, South East London, where he lived during the 1960s and early 70s.
But it wasn’t until 2012, after the scandal erupted that led to the abuse investigation Operation Yewtree, that the workman told police about what he found.
The newspaper quoted a source saying officers from the Metropolitan Police went round the house to look under the floorboards.
And while nothing was found after 40 years, the report made Harris an official “person of interest” in the Yewtree investigation.
It was not long afterwards that Harris’s first victims came forward, and he was questioned under caution in November 2012.
News of the alleged stash came after it was revealed that claims Harris browsed websites featuring girls as young as 13 were never heard by the jury who last week convicted him of 12 counts of indecent assault against children.
Prosecutors were due to claim that the 84-year-old entertainer, sentenced on Friday to five years and nine months in jail, accessed websites with names such as “My little nieces”, “Tiny teen girlfriends” and “Russian girlfriends”.
Harris was charged with four counts of accessing indecent images by police, but never entered pleas as his defence team successfully persuaded the judge, Mr Justice Sweeney, to separate them off from the main trial.
On Friday, prosecutor Sasha Wass QC told Southwark Crown Court that the Crown Prosecution Service had since decided that it was “no longer in the public interest” to pursue a second trial on the outstanding charges “in the light of the 12 unanimous convictions on the counts that Mr Harris faced”.