PH driver accused of raping stranger on the back seat of his cabNottingham driver Shapoor Azimi allegedly raped a former student on the back seat of his taxi in Sneinton, Nottingham Crown Court heard.
He is on trial facing two rape charges involving a passenger in his private-hire car - but claims the stranger actually sexually assaulted him in his car.
The jury heard that he had received a caution for kerb-crawling in 2006, and was convicted in 2011 for soliciting a lone female for sex.
He allegedly attacked the victim in this case, after she got into his car outside a Nottingham city centre club last October.
The ex-graduate fitted the description of another woman Azimi was said to have researched online only days earlier.
Prosecutor Gordon Aspden told the jury the defendant was a man in his mid-thirties who had an intense and persistent interest in seeking out, soliciting, kerb-crawling, and accosting young women.
"It is a sexual compulsion which manifests itself both in public and in private, at work and at leisure, in daylight and in darkness," he told the trial at Nottingham Crown Court.
"His motive, you may conclude, is a powerful desire to engage in sexual activity with young women who are strangers. The purpose purely his sexual gratification. Such contact is clearly to his taste.
"There is an unhealthy, unsavoury interest in deviant and abnormal sexual behaviour towards women, and a deeply ingrained fixation with their sexual exploitation.
"His car, of course, plays an integral part in all this sexual behaviour. It is the place where he indulges himself; the mobile vantage point from which he can observe young women as he cruises around the city."
Azimi, 37, of Chadwick Road, Bobbers Mill, was arrested three days after the alleged rapes. His DNA was found on swabs taken from the 22-year-old woman.
He said within 15 minutes of picking up the woman, she had begged him for sex. Azimi said he had refused because he was a "professional man". He then claimed she sexually assaulted him twice.
Azimi also told the jury in his evidence he was an honest man.
"A man who was capable of exercising iron self-restraint in the face of sexual temptation," said Mr Aspden.
"A man with almost unparalleled respect for women – he gave himself ten out of ten. And in his own estimation physically good looking and very attractive to the opposite sex."
The prosecutor asked the jury, before they deliberate next week, whether the defendant had a motive to lie to them.
"He has, you may think, an absolutely overwhelming motive to lie to you. Mainly to get away with rape, so he can go back to driving his taxi around Nottingham serving the public."
However, he said the victim had "no motive to lie".
He asked the jury what was in it for the woman to get an innocent man, who she had only met for about 12 minutes, wrongly convicted of rape.
"What's in it for her?" Absolutely nothing," he said.
The trial continues on Monday.
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