By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES, Nov 10 (Reuters) – Thomas Markle, an accused child sexual predator and the estranged father of Britain’s Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle, was sent back to jail on Tuesday after cutting off an electronic ankle monitor he was ordered to wear as a condition of home confinement.
US Magistrate Judge Lindsay Griffin found that the father-in-law of Prince Harry had violated the terms of his pretrial release and ordered him returned to federal custody without bond at a hearing in Tampa, Florida, court records showed.
Thomas Markle, 82, had been arrested and charged on Friday with a single federal count of possessing child sexual abuse material, including two explicit photographs of himself posed with a naked underage girl and other images of him with children in various stages of undress.
According to an FBI affidavit filed in court as part of the criminal complaint lodged against him, one of the photos showed a naked girl in a room that appears to be part of a motel chain in the Philippines, where Markle previously resided and where authorities initiated an investigation of him last month.
The affidavit says federal agents seized the material in question, including photographic slides, film negatives and books, from two storage units Markle had rented in Los Angeles since 2008.
Commenting on the case on Friday, FBI Director Kash Patel said Markle “targeted innocent children and sought to steal their innocence through his criminal actions.”
Markle, who most recently resided at an assisted-living facility in Lakeland, Florida, near Tampa, denied possessing sexually explicit photos of children when such allegations first surfaced, telling the Daily Mail they were untrue and “sick lies.”
HOME CONFINEMENT GROWS ‘UNTENABLE’
No plea was entered during Markle’s initial court hearing last Friday, and the judge permitted him to be released from custody on condition that he submit to home detention and the wearing of an electronic monitoring device.
But federal prosecutors said they asked the judge to revoke home-release and keep him locked up pending trial after he was found to have cut the ankle bracelet off early Monday morning.
Agreeing that Markle’s housing situation had “become untenable,” Griffin granted prosecutors’ request. Markle was then re-arrested and returned to federal custody, according to the US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles, where the case against him was brought.
The judge stipulated that Markle was to be kept in a detention facility “separate, to the extent practicable, from” the general jail population. She also ordered Markle to undergo a “prompt medical evaluation.”
The Tampa-based federal public defender assigned to represent Markle did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Griffin on Friday ordered Markle to undergo a psychiatric examination to determine whether he was mentally competent to face prosecution. The judge said she found “reasonable cause to believe” he was suffering from some mental deficiency, based in part on his advanced age and a “lack of recall” he demonstrated during last week’s court appearance.
MEGHAN IN PUBLIC
Meghan, an American actor, has been estranged from her father since the run-up to her marriage to King Charles’ younger son, Harry, in 2018, when the duchess has said she first became aware of the allegations against the elder Markle. She has said she was “deeply distressed” over the matter, which led her to cut off contact between her father and her two children, Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5.
On Tuesday in Brussels, Meghan made her first public appearance since her father was charged, attending an event with Harry at the European Parliament to mark the opening of the Lost Screen Memorial, an art installation commemorating children who died as a result of suffering harm on social media.
Harry delivered a speech at the event, but Meghan canceled her planned address, a spokesperson for the couple said. Neither responded to questions shouted at them by journalists at the gathering.
(Writing and reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; additional reporting by Kate Holton, Michael Holden and Yoruk Bahceli, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and Stephen Coates)
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