Christians Under Attack

Amine Kacem, 24, prowled Manchester city centre looking for victims in a car on which he had deliberately put a large yellow sticker to make it look like a private hire vehicle. The sex attacker, also known as Nazim Hamido, abducted and twice raped the woman after she got in the back of the car on Sackville Street.

Kacem, who was on his first ever visit to Manchester, then calmly drove her back to her hotel. Judge Andrew Blake at Manchester Crown Court said he believed Kacem had deliberately posed as a taxi driver and put a ‘considerable amount of planning’ into the crime.

Jailing Kacem, who buried his head in his hands, the judge told him: "You targeted the victim, whom plainly you correctly identified as being drunk. You showed her no mercy."

The victim was left so psychologically scarred she washed herself with bleach after the attack.

Kacem fled the country for his native France after the attack.

The court heard how a nationwide appeal to track him down was launched and he returned to Britain months later after his girlfriend begged him to come back.

But Kacem did not hand himself in. Instead, he stole a bundle of banknotes from a customer at a Bureau de Change in London because he thought he needed cash for a lawyer.

When he was arrested for that offence, his DNA was taken and he was exposed as a rapist on the run, 18 months after the attack.

Kacem, of Golders Green, London, was jailed for nine years for the rapes. He claimed he was innocent, saying he had consensual sex with the woman and that someone else must have raped her afterwards.

The court heard she had become separated from pals when she was picked up by Kacem in the early hours of March 27, 2009. She told court that the memory of his vehicle with the large yellow sticker had come to her in a flashback.

Neil Fryman, prosecuting, said: "She got in the vehicle thinking she was safe."

The woman suffered a fractured right wrist in the attack, was left badly cut and bruised.

For several months, she feared that she had contracted HIV in the attack.

Mr Fryman said: "Psychologically, she has been affected because she’s now virtually housebound. She has been washing herself with bleach from time to time."

 

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