Man jailed after threatening girl with knife and raping her on Portsmouth street

Abdelrahman Adam, 19, grabbed the victim as she walked home alone and told her to ‘be quiet’ before he raped her in Turner Road, Buckland, after 12.30am on September 20 last year.

Portsmouth Crown Court heard how Adam and a ‘lookout’ had followed the 19-year-old girl on an e-scooter.

After spotting Adam and his friend the victim, who cannot be named, walked onto another road before she was followed.

She was then ‘grabbed’ near Ark Dickens Primary School where there was no CCTV.

‘She was terrified and was not resisting but was crying,’ judge recorder Robert Bright QC said. ‘You told her to keep quiet and she would not be harmed. She begged you not to hurt her.

‘All the way through her fear and distress must have been obvious.

‘She made her way home and was in tears and naturally distraught. She told her mum and called the police.’

Police then sped to the location before arresting the Sudanese national. He denied all involvement - and even boasted there was nothing to ‘link’ him with the crime.

But cracks in his story immediately manifested from medical evidence taken from the girl.

Recorder Bright told Adam: ‘After that you admitted sex but said it was consensual.’

Adam invented a web of lies to try and escape justice by telling police the pair had met up on previous occasions and had exchanged numbers - but phone record checks revealed no communication had taken place and neither had each other’s number.

The defendant’s excuses even stretched to accusations he was the victim. ‘You persisted with your story at the trial and said she enticed you to follow her and that she initiated sex,’ the recorder said.

‘You even said she forced you to have sex against your will. There was no credible evidence to support this.’

Adam’s lies meant the victim had to take the stand during trial and be cross-examined, which she found ‘extremely distressing’.

In her victim statement, read out to court by prosecutor Martyn Booth, she said: ‘I will never forget what you did to me and put me through and the lies you told about me.’

The teenager said she was ‘strong enough to get through something like this’ and thanked the police, prosecution and court, before admitting she felt alone on occasions during her nightmare: ‘At times I felt like there was no one else.’

Referring to the attack, she said: ‘He pushed me into a corner and he said he had a knife and to keep quiet.

‘I was too scared to move in case he tried to hurt me.’

It is not known if Adam did have a knife.

Mr Booth branded Adam’s story as ‘ludicrous’ and pointed to internet phone checks of escort and pornography history as an indication that his account he had ‘no interest in sex’ was ‘about as far from the truth as possible’.

Meanwhile recorder Bright hailed the teenage girl as a ‘hero’ for the way she had conducted herself and secured justice.

‘This brave young woman stood up for herself but also so (Adam) cannot do it to anyone else. Her evidence moved more than one person to tears during the trial,’ he said.

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Recorder Bright also emphasised how the case served to underline how victims of sexual assaults are supported by police, prosecution and the court throughout their ordeals and can receive justice.

‘No one in Portsmouth should feel reluctant to report this kind of crime,’ he said.

The court was told of Adam’s ‘harrowing’ background in North Africa where his father was murdered and his mother incarcerated before his whole family fled war-torn Sudan.

He arrived in the UK in the back of a lorry having travelled to Libya at 14 and on to France and Italy before Britain.

However, any mitigation, including how Adam had no previous convictions, were ‘outweighed’ by the aggravating features of the case.

Adam, of Gathore Road, Wood Green, London, was then jailed for nine years.

A message from the Editor, Mark Waldron

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