DISGRACED FORMER Irish Olympic canoeing coach Keith Francis Burns, already a convicted paedophile, has been convicted of abusing a second schoolgirl athlete.
The court heard he had asked her to seal their “special relationship” by having sex.
The Omagh Crown Court jury of seven men and five women took just under an hour and a half yesterday to convict Burns, who had begged his now 22-year-old victim not to go to the police.
The jury accepted his victim’s assertion that Burns (64), a former member of both the Irish Olympic and Northern Ireland Sports Councils was “lying”.
Burns, from Silverhill, Enniskillen, was jailed in April for two years on seven counts of indecently assaulting one young athlete. He now faces sentence for his three indecent assaults on another girl between September 1999 and July 2002.
Judge Piers Grant told Burns he would sentence him in September for his sex abuse of the girl when she was aged between 13 and 15 years old and when he was aged 55 to 58. While Burns showed no emotion, the parents of both his victims wept openly in court.
Afterwards, the parents of his first victim said that they “can only hope the people of Enniskillen believe us now”.
The family of his second victim said they did not want to make any comment at this stage.
By their unanimous guilty verdicts, the jury rejected Burns’s protests of innocence and excuse that he simply had no explanation as to why the girl would have made such sex abuse claims.
His trial had heard he once told his first victim that he was “an admirer of the human form” and wished he could see her naked. To his second victim, Burns told her of his fantasy of seeing her naked in a shower.
Of the sex abuse claims themselves, Burns maintained he had always acted in an “extremely professionally” way in dealing with young athletes under his care.
He rejected out of hand that he had ever talked to the girl in a “highly sexualised” manner, or spoke of having oral sex or telling her they had “a special relationship”. In particular, Burns denied ever asking her did she “want to sleep with him, have sex with him to seal the relationship”.
Burns first abused the girl in his car. Putting his hand on her thigh he moved it up under her skirt, while asking her did she “feel anything”.
When the frightened schoolgirl said she felt nothing, Burns told her: “Oh I could teach you a lot about sexual feelings and things to do with that nature”.
On the second occasion Burns drove her home from an awards ceremony, taking a longer route home and stopped on a dark country road. There he asked her for a hug, during which he put his hand up the back of her shirt and fumbled with her crop bra.
Finally, Burns assaulted the girl in front of others just seconds before she was to run a race at the Antrim Forum sports ground. Burns, said the girl, rubbed his hand up and down her breast, while giving her a “knowing look”
He will be sentenced in September following the preparation on reports not only on him, but also on his victim.