By Editor,Emma Richter

Copyright dailymail

The elderly man who lied about shooting Charlie Kirk just moments after the conservative activist’s assassination was caught with child pornography on his phone, authorities said.

George Zinn, a 71-year-old Utah resident, was initially suspected of being the shooter after he was caught on video being taken into custody moments after Kirk, 31, was shot in the neck at an event at Utah Valley University last week.

He was soon cleared of being the suspected shooter and confessed to causing a distraction to keep law enforcement away from the shooter, now alleged to be 22-year-old Tyler Robinson.

Following his arrest, which quickly went viral online, Zinn was transported to a hospital for a pre-existing medical condition.

It was there that he not only admitted to helping the alleged killer escape, but that ‘he uses his phone to view and abuse Child Sex Abuse Material and there may be some images on his phone,’ according to the Utah County Sheriff’s Office.

After agreeing to hand his phone over to FBI agents, they found a number of images ‘of prepubescent girls scantily dressed,’ police said.

The Utah Special Victims Unit then took over the matter, leading them to uncover a trove of more evidence on Zinn’s phone.

A search warrant was obtained on Monday and investigators found ‘over 20 images of children ranging from 5 to 12 years old in various stages of undress and sexual posting,’ authorities noted.

Authorities also uncovered ‘several very graphic sexual text threads in which Zinn shared the images with other parties,’ according to police.

He then admitted ‘he gets sexual gratification from viewing and sharing’ the images, and prefers children who are between 5 and 12 years old, the sheriff’s office said.

The material found on his phone remains under investigation.

While at the hospital, Zinn said he decided to cause a disruption at the college campus that day because he ‘wanted to be a martyr for the person who was shot.’

Police said there is no indication he ‘colluded with the shooter,’ only that he was there and falsely admitted to being the shooter, which ‘obstructed law enforcement from focusing on the actual shooter.’

Zinn was released from the hospital and taken to the Utah County Jail after being ordered by a judge on Monday to be held without bail on four counts of second-degree felony sexual exploitation of a minor and one count of second-degree felony obstruction of justice.

He had been charged with trespassing as recently as August 22.

Officials clarified that Zinn was not the shooter shortly after authorities reversed a notice that said they had a suspect in custody.

Zinn was seen in footage that swept social media being detained as witnesses hurled abuse at him, with one branding him a ‘monster’ as others yelled: ‘How dare you?’

Another clip showed Zinn barking back at the crowd to ‘shoot me’, and a cop at the scene was heard saying ‘he said he shot him, but I don’t know,’ the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

After it became clear that Zinn was not the gunman, he was identified by Utah residents as a well-known political activist with a number of small-time arrests to his name.

He is known to frequently show up at protests and demonstrations in the state, and Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill told the Tribune that his office has prosecuted Zinn numerous times dating back to the 1980s.

Many of his arrests were for trespassing, Gill said, describing Zinn as a libertarian conservative who would ‘give me a hard time for being a Dem’.

The District Attorney said he was aware of Zinn from years of political protests in Utah, as at ‘almost every political event you can think of, there was always George somewhere in the background, listening.’

‘He’s a person who can be odd, and has those kinds of odd behavior challenges,’ Gill said, adding that ‘by and large, he’s more of a gadfly than anything else’.

Gill said that his office had tried to get Zinn into mental health court for past misdemeanor charges, but he ‘never really participated in that’.

Zinn’s most serious arrest came in 2013, when he was charged with threatening to plant bombs at the finish line of the Salt Lake City Marathon.

He took a plea deal in the case and initially received a sentence of probation before being ordered to serve a year in jail after violating his probation.

Zinn was also arrested in January on suspicion of trespassing after he reportedly tried to get into the Sundance Film Festival, from which he was banned.

The Tribune reported that Zinn was also in attendance at several political events, including Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson’s 2023 ‘State of the County’ address, a 2023 Sutherland Institute event headlined by Sen. Mike Lee, and former Utah House Speaker Greg Hughes’s 2020 announcement that he was running for governor.

Robinson, 22, was arrested Friday in connection to Kirk’s murder.

It took 33 hours to arrest Robinson, with police and FBI having detained, then released, two people unconnected to the case.

Utah has the death penalty for such crimes – a punishment Trump has said he would like imposed on Robinson.