Guilty, the Afghanistan veteran who preyed on girl recruits
A SCOTTISH war veteran who served i n Iraq and Afghanistan was convicted yesterday of sexually abusing seven young women hoping to join the Army.
Sergeant Edwin ‘Jock’ Mee, 46, attacked the recruits after swapping the excitement of the battlefield for a ‘dull’ job as a deskbound recruiter.
Mee used the screening process to isolate his victims at an Army careers centre in Croydon, south London. He gauged the vulnerability of cadets who were born overseas and then kept them to himself so he could sexually abuse them.
Mee attacked one young Sierra Leonean woman after tricking her i nto believing her visa status depended on him, and even pretended to ring the Home Office moments before raping her.
Glaswegian Mee also pounced on six other recruits, who he spanked on the bottom and pestered to meet him for coffee.
The jury of seven men and five women found Mee guilty of 13 sex offences including two rapes.
He was cleared of three counts of sexual assault, and the jury has still to decide on four more counts of sexual assault and a further rape charge.
Mee, who looked incredulous as the verdicts were read out, had called one woman he raped a ‘time waster’ and described another’s story as ‘absolutely ludicrous’.
Prosecutor Rosina Cottage, QC, said: ‘This case concerns the abuse of trust and power by this man in order to bully and groom young women. He gauged their vulnerability in order to speak about sex to them, to touch them and most serious of all to rape those over whom he had established the strongest control.’
Mee was employed as a recruiting sergeant with the British Army at the Mitcham Barracks Army Careers and Information Office in Croydon. His job was to screen cadet applications, interview the hopefuls and support t hem through training to achieve the required fitness levels.
Miss Cottage said he enjoyed bullying and threatening his new recruits and bragged to one of his rape victims: ‘I am from the Army, I can do anything.’
Mee was arrogant enough to believe none of the women would complain or, if they did, nobody would believe them, said Miss Cottage: ‘Bullying, talking dirty to the young women, smacking bottoms and ultimately raping young women – he got away with it for a year or more. He obviously believed he would never get caught.’
Mee, now back living in Scotland, joined the Army when he was 24. He was made a sergeant for his ‘efforts in Afghanistan’ and was also attached to the Special Forces in the war zone in Iraq for four or five months. After around 19 years service he was medically discharged in April 2014.
The offences were initially investigated by the Royal Military Police, before the case was then handed to the Metropolitan Police.
The trial continues.
‘I’m from the Army, I can do anything’