Man convicted in 2021 extremism case found guilty of possessing child sex abuse materials

A Parkland County man currently in prison has been found guilty of possessing child pornography, which police found on his devices during an unrelated investigation.

Kelvin Maure was convicted in Edmonton on Tuesday by Court of King's Bench of Alberta Justice S.N. Mandziuk.

Maure had pleaded not guilty to the charge, denying he knew of the 1,200 photos and videos of child sex abuse on two of his phones.

Police found the files after Maure was arrested in February 2021 on firearm and weapon charges.

At the time, he was accused of making extreme statements and threatening police and the public on social media.

During their investigation, police seized multiple weapons, explosives, an RCMP shirt, as well as the pair of phones, which they would come to learn held almost 1,200 pictures and 33 videos of child sex abuse.

He was charged with the child pornography offence in November of that year.

Court heard about 400 of the files were cached, or copies automatically made by an operating system, perhaps unbeknownst to a user.

Mandziuk was not convinced Maure knew of these, but he was certain Maure knew about at least some of the others.

"For the remaining 818 files, I am unsure where they were located or which folders they were within and therefore cannot determine how many files the accused knowingly possessed. There are also the concerns about the duplicates potentially created during the investigative steps," Manziuk wrote in his decision.

The justice concluded: "I know that the number of files knowingly possessed by the accused is somewhere between one and 818, however I cannot make a certain finding as to quantity."

Maure will be sentenced at a later date.

For the 2021 weapons charges, he was sentenced in 2023 to six years in prison, less time served.