Polish man jailed for two years over street sex assault

A Polish man who sexually assaulted a woman in a street attack a few months after he arrived in Ireland has received a four-year sentence, with the final two years suspended.

The woman had been on the phone to a friend when she became aware of Mieczyslaw Sudol, 42, following her as she walked home after a night out.

Sudol snatched the woman’s phone when she told him she was speaking to her boyfriend and grabbed her throat before pulling up her dress to sexually assault her.

He ran off with her phone when her screams alerted people in nearby houses.

The father of two, with a previous address at Woodbrook, Cahirciveen, Co Kerry, pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court to sexually assaulting the woman and stealing her phone in the county on May 5, 2008. He has no previous convictions.

Detective Garda Richie Naughton told Pauline Walley, prosecuting, that the victim said her attacker pulled down her underwear during the incident.

The detective said Sudol, who had been working as a tiler in Cork, was arrested for an unconnected incident in 2008 and left the country later that year.

Gardaí eventually traced him to Poland using DNA found under the victim’s fingernails, from when she had scraped his face during the attack.

The woman’s victim impact statement described how the sex assault had been “devastating, profound, and far-reaching” in her life.

“This is the single most horrific act which has ever happened to me,” she said.

The judge took into consideration Sudol’s early guilty plea, clean record, and co-operation and imposed a four-year term, backdated to when he entered custody on the matter in June 2014.