[Shaun]

From the BBC News Article: Here

Detectives investigating the disappearance of Shannon Matthews have arrested her stepfather on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children.

Craig Meehan, 22, was arrested after officers on the Shannon Matthews case carried out inspections on a number of computers.

Mr Meehan was arrested at the family home in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.

Michael Donovan, 39, of Lidgate Gardens, Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, has been charged with kidnapping Shannon.

West Yorkshire Police said in a statement: "During inquiries by the Shannon Matthews investigation team, the contents of a number of computers have been examined.

"As a result of this work, police have arrested a 22-year-old man from the Dewsbury Moor area on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children.

"He is currently being questioned at a West Yorkshire Police Station."

Officers said they did not believe any of the images found on the computer were those of family members.

On Wednesday morning two officers were on duty at the front of the family's red brick home.

Shannon's mother, 32-year-old Karen Matthews was believed to be at a neighbour's home with three of her children.

West Yorkshire detectives were seen going in and out of the house carrying bags and boxes.

Neighbour Peter Brown, 34, said: "We thought we were going back to normality but now all the reporters are back again.

"We thought the next step would be Shannon coming home or at least getting to see her. Now it looks like that could take a while."

Mr Meehan, a fishmonger, has lived at the property with Karen Matthews, a mother-of-seven, for five years.

The nine-year-old schoolgirl was eventually found hidden in the base of a bed at a house a mile from her family home in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire in March, 24 days after she went missing.

But the youngster has not returned home since officers found her and she is in the care of social services.

Her disappearance in February led to the launch of one of the biggest police inquiries in Yorkshire since the Ripper investigation of the 1970s.

[Mrluvaluva]

Shannon is still not home and I am sure the other kids will be taken into care soon also.

[Sticks]

Could have been a porn bomb, a malicious email that when the victim opens it it plants porn all over the victim's computer, (They had this one in CSI Miami) or the computer could have been a second hand one that the previous owner had not properly cleaned. The computer could have been a zombie bot.

We need to the wait for the result of the forensic examination.

[Mrluvaluva]

There is obviously something not right in that household.

[Matt08]

I thought he looked a bit of an odd-ball when the Shannon story first started.

[Sticks]

According to one press report he did allow others to use his computer so it may not have been him who downloaded it.

I can kind of relate to that, some while ago I had someone who would hitch hike down from Aberdeen when HE felt like it and would crash at my place whether or not I felt like it.

He was last down in 2001 before my current computer.

Any hue when I went to bed he would have late night session looking at what I would call pornography, but he said was erotica. (IIRC he says you can not define pornography) It was his surfing one time that placed programs on my machine that would want to hijack my dialup to premium lines.

I even had someone use my credit card fraudulently, possibly because one of the sites he visited planted spyware on my machine which stole my details on logging in to my internet banking.

But also, one time I took a regular back up I had made of my own photographs on a CD ROM, put them in my father's machine and found a folder that I had not known about.

Apparently my father had got windows explorer set to reveal hidden files and folders, given his self admitted lack of tech skills not a good idea.

When I investigated this strange folder, I discovered that my unwelcome house guest had downloaded pornography, (Sorry no such thing as pornography it called erotica), put it in a folder and made it a hidden folder.

I was luck my father was not watching over me when I discovered it


So getting back to the story in hand, I can personally see that it is possibly that while the images were on his machine, the stepfather may not have had anything to do with them.

[Mrluvaluva]

That is plausable I agree, but there is definitely something amiss here. Kids are normally re-united with their parents almost immediately, and for her not to be after all this time means that something is going on.

[Xander]

Originally posted by Matt08
I thought he looked a bit of an odd-ball when the Shannon story first started.

Thats what i thought, i thought he looked rather "strange". Im not really surprised to hear this story developing, I was expecting something like this to come from it.

[Sticks]

Another idea, whether he downloaded it or not, could be that someone feared Shannon had been abducted by a paedophile gang, and so were searching these vile images in case she was in them.

I believe when they caught such people in Portugal they scanned the images on the suspects computers for Madeline.

The latest I heard is that he is on remand until November