AN UNDERCOVER cop who deceived a left-wing activist into a relationship was later convicted and sacked from the police for assaulting his long-term partner, the spycops inquiry heard last week.

Rob Hastings was dismissed from the Metropolitan Police where he worked in the force’s covert Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) after his conviction for assaulting the mother of his three children in 2014.

Mr Hastings went undercover from 2004 to 2007 as part of the SDS’s operations against tens of thousands of mainly left-wing activists for over four decades.

The existence of Mr Hastings’s conviction was not public knowledge until last week’s hearing, which mainly focused on his relationship with another woman known as Maya.

He had deceived her into a relationship which lasted about a year, starting from 2006.

The inquiry heard that Mr Hastings had disappeared from Maya’s life after they broke up in 2007 only to reappear seven years later to convince her to leave her then boyfriend of five years, telling her he wanted to have children.

Maya described having sex with him once that year and that he left the next morning before dawn and totally disappeared once again from her life.

This was a year after he pleaded guilty in 2014 to assaulting his long-term partner.

In her testimony, Maya referred to a previous sexual experience with the undercover cop, when she was distressed that he may have left her pregnant and Mr Hastings offered her no support.

Describing the night in 2015, she said: “The next day I visited my GP to be prescribed the morning-after pill, which I found very upsetting.”

The undercover cop had not told her until giving his evidence this week that he had a vasectomy before their relationship started and admitted he was “clearly being cruel and selfish” by hiding this fact.

Describing a controlling and manipulative Mr Hastings, Maya said she was vulnerable and had mental health struggles due to past trauma when they met in 2006.

She added that she had regularly self-harmed and was suicidal as a result of the cop regularly accusing her of infidelity.

She said: “I often felt like he was using me for sex which made me feel very negatively about myself and my body.”

After the relationship ended, she explained that she started using drugs as a way of coping with the devastation she felt.