South Wales Police has spoken about the investigation into former officer Lewis Edwards who sexually abused hundreds of young girls online
The head of the investigation team who worked to bring paedophile police officer Lewis Edwards to justice has described feeling "shivers" upon realising the perpetrator was a colleague.
Once he had what he wanted, he blackmailed girls between the ages of 10-years-old and 16-years-old into sending more extreme sexual images of themselves over Snapchat, which he recorded and saved on a number of devices. Sickening audio footage was played to the court of Edwards performing a sex act as he spoke to an 11-year-old girl, and pixelated footage of a 14-year-old girl crying and begging the defendant to stop, as she was forced to pose sexually.
She said: "We didn’t formally know who he was until February. We had a piece of intelligence, financial related intelligence, in December which we investigated to try and identify who was making purchases on the dark web for child sexual abuse images. Upon attending Edwards' family home in Heol Ty Cribwr, Cefn Glas, on February 8, police were met with a "complex scene", with the defendant building software on his devices which could result in the entire contents being wiped.
"By downloading that information at the scene in quick succession provided to us by those officers, they were able to tell us quickly he had file structures listed in age categories. It was quite easy to see we have got images potentially in age perimeters. It was a deep breath moment, you can’t comprehend what you are seeing because he was one of us."
"He was a student officer for a large chunk of his service and was only on shift for a short space of time. His shift was one of the first teams we needed to make aware of what had gone on, because all of them were asking where their colleague was, they were wondering to themselves.
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