The Irish Scissor Sisters (20 page)

Noor was interviewed again on 17 September 1998 and claimed that scars on his wrist and head were inflicted by a group of bandits or soldiers from one of the defeated tribes during the war in Somalia.

In early December Farah Swaleh Noor’s application for refugee status in Ireland was rejected. He was informed of the decision on 2 February 1999, over two years after his application was submitted. Nine days later he appealed the decision and that appeal was heard on 3 June 1999. The Appeals Authority recommended that his appeal be granted and he was officially given refugee status in Ireland on 30 July 1999. This meant that he was now legally entitled to be in the country and could claim social welfare payments, under his assumed name. Friends of Noor say that he was proud to be legally living in Ireland. They said that he was happy in the country and, for the most part, that he got on with people. He owned several Ireland soccer jerseys and was a big supporter of the national team. On 21 August 2003 Noor made an application for Irish citizenship and this was still being considered when he was murdered.

While Farah Noor’s application for refugee status had been going through the slow and bureaucratic system, he lived in quite a few flats around the city, including one in 47 North Strand Road in Dublin. He spent most of 1997 there and the owner, Leah Morahan, remembers Noor as being ‘very friendly and charming’. He never caused trouble or problems for her ‘except for late night partying or dope smoking’. He also had a flat at 573 North Circular Road in Dublin 7 and spent quite a bit of time housed in the Rosepark Hotel on Baker’s Corner in Dun Laoghaire in South Dublin.

Farah Noor spent most of his days in Ireland drinking. He was a serious alcoholic who would get through three or four large bottles of vodka a day without any problems. He was a friendly man when sober and was well known around various pubs in Dublin city centre and Dun Laoghaire. Alcohol wasn’t his sole vice though. Noor was an occasional user of a variety of hard and soft drugs including grass, hash, cocaine, ecstasy and possibly even heroin. As well as the names Farah Swaleh Noor and Sheilila Said Salim, he also occasionally went by a third alias, Shilelagh Swaleh Shagoo.

Noor loosely socialised with the Somalian community in both Dublin and Cork. He would turn up in a pub and go in every day for months on end, before disappearing and not being seen or heard from for a year or more. He was the same with his friends. They would see him occasionally and then he would up and leave without a word to anybody. He spent a lot of time drinking with friends around the Blessington Street area and would spend every second night or so there, drinking with other men who’d come to Ireland from Somalia. His Somalian friends didn’t know that in reality Farah was from Kenya and was using an assumed name.

Noor’s friends knew him by quite a few nicknames including Sheilila, America and Abawa. Farah was a massive football fan and religiously followed the English Premiership. He was a big Manchester United fan and had three or four Man United jerseys and two tracksuits, as well as other clothes bearing the emblem. He even wore a Man United sovereign ring.

In August 1997 Farah met a Chinese girl in Dr Quirkey’s amusement arcade on O’Connell Street. ‘Lynn’ was just sixteen and was mentally disabled. She was playing pool with a friend when Farah went up to her and asked her to be his girlfriend. He told her that he wanted her babies. He had never seen or spoken to her before and Lynn refused. She did agree to go back to his flat, however, and when they arrived Noor sat beside her on the couch and then forced her to have sex with him. It was the only time that the pair had sexual intercourse. Lynn found out she was pregnant one month later and when she told Farah he said he wasn’t interested. He wanted nothing to do with her or the baby. She rarely saw Noor after that and he didn’t try to meet his son ‘John’ until he had drunkenly called to Lynn’s city-centre flat out of the blue, on St Patrick’s Day.

Lynn later told gardaí: ‘Farah was not violent to me. We had a nice relationship. I was with him for nine months and I only had sex with Farah once. Farah lived by himself in the flat down the road. When John was born Farah never saw him. I think he was six years old when Farah first saw him. Farah called to the house here to see him. I don’t know if John saw Farah on 20 March 2005. He didn’t tell me that he saw him. John would know what Farah looks like and he knows that Farah is his dad. When I first met Farah we used to play pool together. Sometimes Farah would phone me to meet with him. I didn’t have a phone number for him. He would phone me ’cos he had my number. The last time I saw him before March 2005 was last year. I was walking near Jury’s on Parnell Street when I heard someone call me and when I looked I see Farah. He stopped but he told me he goes to work. He told me he stayed in a hotel and that’s where he lived. He didn’t tell me the name of the hotel.’

Although this statement doesn’t portray Noor as nasty or violent, Lynn would later give a far different version of events during Linda and Charlotte’s court case, claiming that he was a brute.

Noor’s life changed in April 1998 when he met and fell in love with ‘Paula’, who was out celebrating her sixteenth birthday. She was in third-year in secondary school and the courts have since asked that Paula’s real identity should not be revealed. Paula was walking through town with her friends when Noor approached her and started talking to her. He told her he was twenty, even though he had told the authorities he was born in 1967 and was supposedly thirty-one. They started going out and she became pregnant less than three months later.

Paula gave birth to their son in March 1999. They were very happy at first. Farah was a devoted dad who spent a lot of time with his son and loved and cared for his partner. He stopped calling round to most of his Somalian friends and was very close to Paula’s family. He used to go fishing and hiking with her father and moved into her family home in South Dublin.

When the baby was about three months old, however, Noor began to drink a lot and his behaviour and attitude changed. He would often disappear for days on drunken benders and he started hitting his girlfriend. Paula would later describe to detectives how Noor was a ‘lovely man’ at first but changed when he started drinking.

Noor and Paula were given accommodation by the council and over the next three years moved into three different houses in the same area as Paula’s family. Farah put his ex-girlfriend through years of hell. She spoke to gardaí on a number of occasions and shocked officers with her harrowing accounts of life with the alcoholic Kenyan. She told detectives how she had feared that it was only a matter of time before Noor murdered her.

The first time he hit her was during a night out with one of her friends. He accused the woman of being a lesbian who wanted to sleep with Paula. His girlfriend stood in shock as Noor abused her pal in graphic sexual terms. Paula was so afraid of him that she didn’t go home that night. The following day she turned her key in the door and Noor attacked her, giving her a vicious beating. She did not go to hospital and subsequently returned to Farah because she was young and naïve. When he said he’d never do it again the seventeen-year-old believed him.

Farah regularly beat her black and blue after that, for no other reason than that he was drunk. He would pull her hair and punch her on the head so he did not leave marks. She was forced to call the guards three or four times because of his violence towards her and others. Paula made a number of complaints to Tallaght Garda Station about her boyfriend but still did not have the courage to leave him.

Noor used to burn himself with cigarettes and threatened to do the same to his girlfriend. The violence against her started to occur every single day and he eventually started to rape her. Paula later stated he had had ‘very brutal sex anytime and anywhere he wanted it and wouldn’t take no for an answer’. Eventually rape and domestic violence became an everyday experience, living with Farah Swaleh Noor. Paula, who was only a young girl, thought at the time that this animalistic behaviour was normal. Nevertheless she left him on two occasions but Noor came and begged her to get back with him, promising that he would change and be a better father. She gave him the benefit of the doubt and went back to him but the beatings always continued.

He didn’t just take out his aggression on Paula but regularly became involved in fistfights for no reason at all. She said he was ‘someone who’d get into a row at the drop of a hat’. Paula also spoke to gardaí about Noor’s obsession with knives. He pulled one from his pocket one day and threatened, ‘he’d cut me up like a chicken’. Noor said he had once been a butcher in England and always carried a Swiss Army knife and a large dagger. Paula was very worried about the dangerous knives he carried around. She stole a few from him and destroyed them so he could cause no harm with them.

Noor spent each day drinking several large bottles of vodka and often accused Paula of cheating on him, even though he wouldn’t let her out of the house and monitored her phone calls and text messages. When he was extremely drunk he would stumble to the front hall of their South Dublin council house and have two-way conversations with himself in the mirror. He wouldn’t speak in English and pretended to be two different characters, talking to himself for minutes at a time. On good nights he’d then fall into bed and sleep the booze off, but more often than not he’d destroy the front room of the house, overturning tables and chairs and breaking ornaments. When the demons were present he’d beat Paula, rape her in the front room and tie her up while his son slept, oblivious in an upstairs bedroom. He’d then get his camera out and force her to lie in degrading sexual positions while he photographed her, laughing demonically.

A woman called ‘Avril’ moved into the same house as Noor and Paula in early 2001 and later described him as being an ‘unstable’ control freak. Avril is a fake name used to protect her identity. The twenty-five-year-old only lived with the couple and their twenty-two-month-old son for three weeks but saw enough during that time to convince her that the Kenyan was an aggressive brute who had a ‘serious drink problem’. Paula showed Avril the negatives of pornographic photographs that he had taken of her naked, where she was bound up and blindfolded in sick sexual positions. Paula was forced into posing for these photos and beaten if she refused. Noor caught her trying to destroy them one day and went ballistic. He badly thrashed her in front of their young son.

Avril saw Noor bully Paula, both physically and emotionally, and found the eighteen-year-old ‘very vulnerable and naïve’. She said she was ‘directly under the control of Noor at all times. She couldn’t do anything without his permission and he was constantly checking on her.’

On 11 May 2000 Farah had decided that he needed a job to earn some extra cash and registered with Adecco Recruitment Agency in Tallaght. He supplied them with copies of his identification card, issued by the Garda National Immigration Bureau, to prove that he was legally allowed to work in Ireland. He got a job five days later with Sydney Cooper on the Ballymount Road, Dublin 22. Farah worked there for just two weeks because the job was only temporary. On 13 June he got another job with DFDS Transport Ltd at Toughers Business Park, Nass, and spent about seven weeks in employment there. Adecco transferred his pay cheque directly into Paula’s bank account in the Irish Permanent, as he continued to work for the agency over the next few months.

While Noor was out working during the day, Paula used to break down and complain to Avril about her life with him. She wasn’t allowed leave the house to see anyone and she couldn’t even pop to the local shop without asking first. Avril witnessed Noor’s violence towards his girlfriend on several occasions and later said in her statement: ‘He would beat her by slapping her across the face and knocking her to the ground. She would curl up on the ground to protect herself and he would kick her. He would even do this when she was holding the baby. He had no scruples whatsoever and when he was drunk he would do this in front of anyone, both in public and back at the house. The main motivation for this was jealousy and possessiveness on Noor’s behalf. There was never any reason for him to be this way but he would never believe her. It was like he was looking for an excuse to beat her.’

Avril witnessed Noor go through Paula’s phone to see who she had been texting. She regularly heard stories about the daily rapes that her friend suffered at the hands of the monster who was supposed to be her partner and who was the father of their son.

Just a few weeks after Avril moved in with the couple, Noor also started to become abusive towards her. He believed that Avril was trying to convince Paula to leave him. She began to fear for her own safety and left at the first available opportunity, asking Paula to go with her, but the eighteen-year-old refused.

Avril remained in almost daily contact with her friend and a couple of weeks after she fled the house she received a call from the young mum, begging her for help. She went to the house with a male friend just after midnight and encountered a drunken Noor who had wrecked the place in a fit of anger. Paula was on her hands and knees, cleaning broken mirrors and glasses on the living room floor. The Kenyan didn’t even think about helping her and cursed, demanding more drink. Noor eventually calmed down and started laughing and joking as if nothing had happened. He eventually collapsed asleep on the bed. Avril and her friend tried to convince Paula to leave with them but she was too scared. The teenager was also worried that she had nowhere to go and that Noor would follow her.

Avril rang her friend’s parents the next morning and warned them that their daughter would be killed if she didn’t get away from the domineering African. Paula’s dad went to the house that day and collected his daughter.

Paula had eventually got the courage to leave Farah Noor for good this time. While she was recovering with her parents, she took a barring order out against Farah in the courts. She won full custody of their son in April 2001. ‘He abused me so I just got up and left him,’ she said.