Robert Edward Bill 'found with 730 child porn pics on computers'

A suspect impeded a police investigation into indecent images of children by arranging for a laptop computer?s hard drive to be destroyed, it was alleged yesterday.

But police who examined two other computers used by Robert Edward Bill found a total of 730 indecent images of children, a jury at Mold Crown Court was told.

One of them also had 42 ?banners? on it indicating the type of sites visited.

The images had all been deleted from the computers and it would not have been possible to access them without the specialist equipment used by North Wales Police.

Bill, 54, of Franklyn, The Roe, St Asaph, denies 18 charges involving 730 images; 683 on a laptop and 47 on a tower computer which it is alleged he used for work.

He denies 10 charges of making indecent images of children by downloading them onto a laptop computer, and one of possessing the remaining 673 images on that computer.

Bill has further denied six charges of making images on the tower computer and one of possessing the remaining 41.

He has denied doing acts tending to pervert the course of justice by giving instructions to conceal another computer.

Prosecuting barrister Karl Scholz said that in June last year police searched the defendant?s home and seized five computers, and the images were found on two.

Mr Scholz said the forensic examination would not identify who had actually downloaded the images but it was the prosecution case that while there were other users registered to the computers, the defendant was the main user.

The jury heard that 14 of the banners on the laptop and 42 images had been found in a file created at a time of a system crash, and that pinpointed that they were being viewed at 10.08am on June 17, 2007.

Two banners and 11 images had been found in ?system restore? folders and one explanation for that was that they had been placed in that folder while the user was trying to re-set the computer.

The police had missed a further computer during the original search and it was the prosecution case that Bill had instructed members of his family to conceal it.

Its hard drive had later been damaged to such an extent it could not be examined.

Interviewed, Bill told police he did not know how the images got there. ?Just about everybody had access to those computers,? he said.

Bill said the removal of the further laptop and its destruction were nothing to do with him.

The trial continues.

Welshnews