BBC broadcaster Huw Edwards pleads guilty to taking indecent photographs of children

BBC broadcaster Huw Edwards pleaded guilty Wednesday to "making indecent images of children" (known as pedopornographic) and sharing them in a WhatsApp chat two days after London's Metropolitan Police formally charged him with the same offense.

The 62-year-old Welsh journalist announced his decision at a preliminary session at Westminster Magistrates' Court in London.

This will mean that the judge will pronounce his sentence at a later date without the need for a trial. The journalist, who appeared in a dark suit and remains at liberty under police control, faces up to ten years in prison.

The indictment is based on 41 images, some of a minor aged 7 to 9 years, shared on the messaging application WhatsApp between December 2020 and August 2021.

Specifically, a police spokesman said in statements reported by NBC News, he is charged with three counts of sharing images of minors on WhatsApp between December 2020 and April 2022, an accusation that led to Edwards' arrest on Nov. 8, 2023:

"The offences, which are alleged to have taken place between December 2020 and April 2022, relate to images shared on a WhatsApp chat. Edwards was arrested on 8 November, 2023. He was charged on Wednesday, 26 June following authorization from the Crown Prosecution Service."London Metropolitan Police.

A year earlier, just as the alleged crime was discovered, the BBC had suspended the broadcaster, associated with some of the UK's most important events, after several British media outlets discovered that Edwards had been accused of paying an underage boy in exchange for pornographic photographs. 

A few days later, and once the police investigation had begun, the presenter decided to resign from his post at the British channel and was subsequently hospitalized as a result of depression.

AFP recalls that it all began when a mother accused, in a statement to a media outlet, the presenter of having paid some 35,000 pounds (equivalent to $43,000 dollars) to her son over a period of three years so that he would send him pornographic photos.

This fact aroused a great stir among the British media that did not hesitate to investigate whether the accusation was true and, little by little, uncovered other similar cases which, in turn, sparked criticism of the BBC for how it was handling the scandal. 

Huw Edwards presented for twenty years the evening news at 10 p.m. before finding himself at the center of the scandal last year.

It was he who announced to Britons the death of Queen Elizabeth II, on Sept. 8, 2022.