���˿���

A police officer "sought to exploit" a vulnerable victim of crime "for his own benefit" and then forced her lie about their relationship, a court has heard.

Paul Higgins, 42, of Hengoed, Caerphilly, met the complainant when he was an attending officer after she called the police about a domestic abuse incident.

Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court heard that the South Wales Police officer "pursued and engaged" in a sexual relationship with the woman between June 2020 and August 2021.

He denies five charges, including the improper exercise of police powers and privileges by a constable, three counts of unauthorised access to police computer systems and perverting the course of justice.

Prosecutor Ian Wright told jurors that he improperly accessed police computer records about the progress of the court case against the complainant’s husband.

Mr Higgins then "persuaded her to tell a cover story he’d concocted" to his superiors and investigators from the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), said Mr Wright.

The jury was shown 90-minute-long recording of the complainant’s police interview.

In it, she said contact from Mr Higgins and his visits to her house made her “feel special.”

In the interview she said Mr Higgins had revealed their relationship to a colleague, who proceeded to tell the officer to raise it with his sergeant.

“He said he would,” said Mr Wright, adding:“but he didn’t."

When Mr Higgins's sergeant asked him about the situation, the PC told his superior that he was seeing a girl and things were going well, heard the court.

He told his sergeant that they had "dated before and reconnected".

The complainant said Mr Higgins told her that, if anyone asked, she should say they had met on a night out years earlier.

Mr Wright said the complainant “did as Paul Higgins instructed her to do and she provided a wholly false account to the IOPC”.

The court heard that he told her if she did not do that he could lose his job and had contemplated suicide.

In her video interview she said she “felt obliged to help him and she feared he would take his own life.”

She told officers that she felt “ashamed” and “stupid” for going along with it and that she wanted to prevent him “exploiting other vulnerable victims in future."

"It was an abusive relationship towards the end, not physical, he’d never hit me, but emotional abuse,” she said.

"I’d like to think that our relationship wasn’t a fake relationship, that it was real," she said.

"The way that it started was wrong and he knew what he was doing could get him into trouble."

Mr Higgins denies the charges and the trial continues.