Soham officer is charged
Soham police officer Brian Stevens and a Crown Prosecution Service worker were today charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
Detective Constable Brian Stevens, 42, was arrested yesterday, along with 32-year-old Louise Austin, an administrator with the CPS.
They have both been charged in relation to Dc Stevens's trial last month at which he was acquitted of child sex and computer pornography offences.
West Midlands Police said Stevens, who worked as a police liaison officer for the family of murdered Soham schoolgirl Jessica Chapman, will appear at Bedford magistrates' court on 16 September.
The pair were arrested in Cambridgeshire and questioned. They have both been released on police bail.
At 4am today West Midlands Police released a statement confirming the charges.
Police also confirmed the allegations had no connection to the disappearance of 10-year-old Jessica and her best friend, Holly Wells.
Soham detective Stevens was cleared of the original charges last month when the case against him collapsed at London's Snaresbrook Crown Court because key evidence was found to contain " substantial errors".
He was pictured hand in hand with his wife Jane after the prosecution offered no evidence on all 11 charges. At the time he said he was "tremendously relieved".
The detective was originally arrested in September last year as part of Operation Ore, a massive inquiry into internet paedophiles who accessed a US-based child sex site.
His name appeared on a list of 279 suspected paedophiles handed to Cambridgeshire Police and forensic examination of a computer in his living room showed there were a number of photographic images on it.
He was charged with having indecent pictures of children on the laptop computer. A month later it emerged that he had also been charged with two counts of indecently assaulting two teenage girls.
Stevens always denied he had downloaded the images, claiming that his credit card must have been cloned.
All charges were dropped after the prosecution admitted a computer expert had made two crucial errors in the analysis of the computer. It was also claimed Stevens did not have exclusive access to the laptop.
At a magistrates' court hearing in the run-up to the case, however, the father of two did admit that he had accessed an internet chatroom posing as a teenage girl, claiming he did so because he was "curious".
His arrest in September came shortly after he was seen by millions on TV reading a moving poem at a memorial service for Holly and Jessica. He had comforted Jessica's family while the girls were missing and helped break the news to them that they were dead.
