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PRIVATE Jake Kovco told his mother he put a gun in his mouth when he was 14 because he had felt so low about being molested when he was seven.

Giving evidence at the inquest into Pte Kovco`s death, Judith Kovco today said her son told her he then took the gun out of his mouth and fired it over his shoulder.

"He felt so low about what happened to him as a child,`` she said.

He kept it a secret for so long, at that stage he just wanted to end the whole lot.``

Pte Kovco, 25, was shot with his own service pistol in a room at an Australian army barracks in Baghdad on April 21, 2006.

A board of inquiry found Australia`s first military casualty in Iraq had shot himself in the head while "skylarking`` with his pistol.

The current inquest involves a jury of six, at the request of the Kovco family.

Mrs Kovco earlier told the inquest the family moved from the Melbourne suburb where the molestation occurred to Briagolong, in Victoria`s East Gippsland area, when her son was seven or eight.

After finishing school, Pte Kovco had worked for about three years in the knackery where he used a firearm every day to shoot the animals.

He had also hunted deer and was proficient in the use of weapons, his mother said.

Earlier a woman who had a brief affair with Pte Kovco says he told her he`d once tried to kill himself with a shotgun.

Ms Johns told the inquest she met the soldier at a Brisbane pub in February 2006, and while at the hotel "he took his genitals out of his pants".

She said people had been laughing, but she did not know what motivated him to expose himself.

Later that evening, she asked him to tell her something that nobody else knew and he revealed he had been "molested when he was a young boy by his 17-year-old neighbour and that he was pretty depressed about it".

"He had tried to shoot himself with a shotgun in the back of his dad`s ute and he was drinking a lot and his dad came and stopped him," Ms Johns told Glebe Coroner`s Court.

She said she had been a little shocked about what he had said and did not really "dig deep".

"I asked if he was OK and he said he was fine, he had worked through it, it happened a long time ago."

Ms Johns, who was wearing a black, sleeveless dress with a beaded neckline, said she was intimate with the soldier on two occasions but did not see him again after he told her he was married, but separated.

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