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Kids’ football coach who sexually assaulted child and photographed rape victims is jailed

Noel Cowan was sentenced to six and a half years

Roisin Gorman

Today at 06:20

A Former children’s football coach is behind bars after admitting more than 20 sex crimes, including three rapes, as he lived out his sick sexual fantasy of attacking unconscious women.

Noel Cowan was sentenced to six and a half years at Craigavon Crown Court for 17 sex assaults including two counts of rape, 11 counts of sexual assault, sexual assault of a child under 13, possessing indecent images of a child and drug related offences.

One of his victims has accused him of drugging her as he posed her for pictures to recreate images he’d found on the dark web of lifeless women being abused.

The father of four and Northern Ireland soccer fanatic, from Russell Street in Armagh, who was previously a youth coach with Portadown FC, also admitted to two sexual assaults on a young girl and eight counts of possessing indecent images.

The court heard three counts of possession of class A, B and C drugs had been separated from his 25 sex offences.

His defence team said he had been addicted to cocaine since 2017 and that had led to other recreational drug use and greater risk-taking behaviour.

Cowan’s sordid secret life came to light in 2020 when Google alerted police to suspicious traffic linked to his account.

When police seized his phone they found indecent images of the young girl and dozens of pictures of his attacks on the two women, one of whom he raped three times.

The victim of two of the sex assaults says she knew nothing about his attacks until the police came to her door. She has no idea if he shared the pictures and videos he took as she lay unconscious, but she is adamant that Cowan drugged her.

“They said in court that we were unconscious because of alcohol but no one could do that to me without me knowing, no matter how much I had to drink,” she told the Sunday World.

“I’m a light sleeper and there’s no way I would have slept through what he did to me.

“In one of the pictures the police told me I was stripped naked, and in the other he had pulled my top up and my trousers down.

“I asked what else he’d done to me and the police said he could have touched me before or after he took the pictures.

“The other victim also believes she was drugged and he took pictures of himself raping her. We’ve put that in our victim impact statements so the judge will be aware of that when he decides on the sentence.

“I’m 100 per cent sure he drugged us, and he’s admitted himself he’s a drug user.”

Cowan, who courted media attention when he and a group of friends converted an old caravan to travel to Euro 2016 in France to support Northern Ireland, was known to both victims.

He was also in a position of trust with his youngest victim. The former football coach abused her under the pretence of a game he called ‘find the Polo’ when he would conceal the sweet on himself and then on her as an excuse to touch her.

The images of the child, which he’d stored on his phone, showed his hand under her clothes touching her chest and her thigh.

When the PSNI found those images and set about finding the young girl they also found the pictures he’d downloaded from the dark web of unconscious women being raped and sexually assaulted.

“We were told as soon as the police went to his door he ran upstairs and tried to delete stuff off his phone, but they were able to find it,” said Cowan’s victim.

“He’d kept the videos and pictures for a couple of years on his phone.

“The police initially thought the images from the dark web were me and his other victim, but then they found the images of us. He’d used us to recreate the pictures he’d found of other women.

“It’s like something out of a horror film. His other victim has been really badly affected by this. She doesn’t want to go out of the house. I can only cope with it because I try not to think about it.”

At his first police interview in September 2020, Cowan, aged in his forties, initially gave a ‘no comment’ interview.

He later admitted to the charges relating to the young girl, but denied the crimes against the two women, and eventually pleaded guilty to all of the sex charges.

“He didn’t have much choice but to plead guilty, because it’s all on his phone,” said his victim.

“And I believe he only pleaded guilty to stop all of this coming out. I know that one of the searches he did on his phone was ‘am I a paedophile’.

“I’ve known him for years, and I always thought he was a bit of a creep.

“He’s a real narcissist who thinks he’s better than everyone else.

“Because he was so big in the football he thought he was the bee’s knees, that he was a real pillar of the community. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Cowan told police he hadn’t shared the images he took, but the court heard it was an aggravating factor that he’d kept the images and videos and it would exacerbate the anxiety of his victims if they thought he had distributed them.

His victim says she doesn’t believe the rapist has told the truth.

“I know he has another phone and he’s refusing to let the police look at it.

“There is the worry that some day someone’s going to show me a picture they’ve found that he took of me. That makes me feel so sick I don’t even want to think about it.

“The police asked me if I wanted to see the pictures but I knew if I looked at them I’d never get that image out of my head.”

She has also raised the question that Cowan may have other victims.

“He had those pictures of that child for three years, whether it was for his gratification or to distribute them.

“I believe there are other victims out there.”