Thomas Markle ordered back to jail after cutting off his ankle bracelet

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 ordered back to jail on Tuesday after cutting of an electronic monitoring device he was supposed to wear as a condition of home confinement, federal prosecutors said.

US Magistrate Judge Lindsay Saxe Griffin ordered the 82-year-old father-in-law of Prince Harry returned to federal detention without bond at a hearing in Tampa, Florida, according to the US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles, where the case against him is pending.

Thomas Markle was arrested and charged on Friday on 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 Markle, federal agents seized the material in question, part of a cache of slides, film negatives and books, from 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 was most recently residing at an assisted living facility in Lakeland, Florida, near Tampa.

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 a monitoring device.

But federal prosecutors on Monday asked the judge to revoke home-release and keep him detained in custody pending trial after he cut the ankle bracelet off overnight, and Griffin granted prosecutors’ request.

Griffin on Friday also ordered Markle to undergo a psychiatric evaluation to determine whether he was mentally competent to face prosecution. She cited her own reasonable cause to believe Markle was suffering from some mental deficiency, based in part on his advanced age and a “lack of recall” he demonstrated during his court appearance.

(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)