Seems to be a lot of this kind of stuff around Oxford
Jail for Oxford cab driver who raped 19-year-old customerhttps://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/19578 ... -customer/
Image: Thames Valley Police/Oxford MailA cab driver who raped his teen customer after helping her upstairs was accused of ‘grossly’ breaching the trust placed in him as a driver.Jailing Asif Khan for 10 years at Oxford Crown Court on Monday, Judge Michael Gledhill QC said: “As your victim said more than once during the trial; you trust taxi drivers.
“As prosecutor Mr Seymour has reminded us all, the Court of Appeal recently has said that taxi drivers taking lone women home at night are in a position of trust. It is just common sense that is the position.”
During the trial, jurors heard that the victim had been out drinking on the night of August 18, 2017. She was drinking with a friend at The Swan and Castle Wetherspoons pub before heading on to Atik nightclub in Park End Street.
By the early hours of the next morning she had spent an hour in the club’s medical room throwing up.
Shortly before 2am, she was helped down the stairs by the club’s general manager and got into 37-year-old Asif Khan’s black cab. Traffic cameras clocked Khan’s taxi heading north on Woodstock Road at 1.58am.
The victim, who was then 19-years-old, said the driver had helped her open the door. She stumbled upstairs to her bedroom and fell off the bed. Khan moved her back onto the bed and, using a condom taken from a box in the room, raped the woman.
The following morning, she found the driver’s Bluetooth headset discarded in the room together with a torn condom wrapper. Khan’s DNA was found on the headset, the wrapper and the waistband of her knickers.
In a statement written last year and read to the court after the jury found Khan guilty of rape, the victim accused the driver of taking advantage of her drunken state.
She described herself as previously having a strong, independent personality: “[He] has robbed me of all of this and has cost me years of worry, stress and anxiety.”
Khan denied the allegations against him. He claimed he’d picked the victim up from St Aldates and agreed to drive her up the Woodstock Road until the meter hit £8.
However, when he stopped the cab she demanded to be taken home, then clawed at him through the cab’s open window when he tried to drive away – grabbing the Bluetooth headset, he alleged.
He said he’d spat at her after she spat at him but did not tell the police about spitting at her as he was concerned about losing his cab licence. The DNA found on her knickers could have been from his spittle, his lawyers said.
The court heard he had four children. He had come to the UK as a student and had completed a masters at Oxford Brookes University. He had no previous convictions.
Sentencing Khan on Monday afternoon, Judge Gledhill said he accepted that Khan had not gone out on the evening of August 18 intending to commit rape.
He told the defendant: “You took advantage of a young, attractive woman that you knew could do nothing about you having sexual intercourse with her.”
Khan, formerly of Pattison Place, Oxford, was convicted of one count of rape and acquitted of a second rape charge. He will remain on the sex offender register for life.
Image: Oxford Mail
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