A disgraced former Royal Navy commander, who was once honoured by the Queen, has avoided jail after being caught on camera by paedophile hunters posing as a 14-year-old boy.
Lieutenant Commander Graham Trewhella, from Gosport in Hampshire, blamed loneliness after being arrested for using dating app Grindr to meet someone he thought was a teenage boy, a court heard.
But when he arrived to meet ‘George’, the 62-year-old was instead greeted by a man from vigilante paedophile hunting group Trap, an online organisation with more than 241,000 likes on Facebook.
Hampshire Police were called by the group and later found more than 1,000 indecent images of children on his computer.