London, ENGLAND — A former Scotland Yard detective has told BBC News he was “shocked” by the amount of pornography viewed on a computer seized from the Commons office of senior Tory MP Damian Green.
Neil Lewis examined the device during a 2008 inquiry into government leaks and has not spoken publicly before.
He said “thousands” of thumbnail images of legal pornography were on it.
Mr Green, Theresa May’s deputy, has said he never watched or downloaded pornography on the computer.
But Mr Lewis said a check of the computer’s internet history over a three-month period showed pornography had been viewed “extensively”.
‘No doubt’
On some days, websites containing pornography were being searched for and opened for several hours.
Mr Lewis, who retired from the Metropolitan Police in 2014, said although “you can’t put fingers on a keyboard”, a number of factors meant that he was sure it was Mr Green who was accessing the pornographic material.
His analysis of the way the computer had been used left the former detective constable in “no doubt whatsoever” that it was Mr Green, who was then an opposition immigration spokesman but is now the first secretary of state.
“The computer was in Mr Green’s office, on his desk, logged in, his account, his name,” said Mr Lewis, who at the time was working as a computer forensics examiner for SO13, the counter-terrorism command.
“In between browsing pornography, he was sending emails from his account, his personal account, reading documents… it was ridiculous to suggest anybody else could have done it,” Lewis said of the Tory MP.
It was recently reported that British MPs and their staff tried to access porn on work computers 113,000 times in 2016.
