Sam Cooper (Vancouver Province) – A former Alberta Mountie jailed for child porn offences and sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy in Vancouver has died in a federal prison in Agassiz of a believed suicide.

On Friday, 54-year-old Warren Robert Allen of Vancouver was found unresponsive in his cell by prison guards, and later pronounced dead at Chilliwack General Hospital, prison officials said Monday.

A source told The Province that Allen died of a self-inflicted wound, however assistant warden Brenda Miller said for privacy reasons she could not disclose circumstances of the death. Chilliwack RCMP Cpl. Tammy Hollingsworth said no foul play is suspected, and police are not investigating Allen’s death.

In January, Allen was sentenced to three years, three months, after pleading guilty to one count of possession of child porn for the purpose of distribution and one count of sexual assault.

He was arrested in May 2010 after police executed a search warrant on Allen’s Vancouver apartment, and found 27,000 images of children under the age of five being sexually abused, after reviewing just 200,000 of 840,000 images on his computer.

Allen’s sexual assault victim, who can only be identified by the initials K.R. due to a publication ban, was discovered after police found that Allen had chatted with the boy online and lured him to his apartment.

Allen, who was HIV-positive, arranged to have an HIV-positive male friend pick up the boy and bring him to Allen’s West End apartment, where the two men sexually assaulted the youth in September 2009.

Later, Allen bragged about the “tag-team” sexual assault on a chat line.

In sentencing, B.C. Supreme Court Madam Justice Sunni Stromberg-Stein found that mitigating factors in the case included that Allen has no prior criminal record and was a “very intelligent, high-functioning and high-achieving” man.

Allen served as an RCMP officer in Alberta from 1978 to 1984, the judge noted, before leaving to get his law degree from Queen’s University.

Allen’s death is not the first at Mountain Institution involving inmates imprisoned for child sex crimes. In March 2008, Michael Andrew Gibbon, 39, who was serving a sentence for child pornography offences, was beaten to death during a prison riot.

And in March 2007, James Patrick Jones, 55 — convicted in the 1987 first-degree murder and sexual assault of three-year-old Stacie Harker — was found unresponsive in his cell by prison guards.

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