Daily Mail
November 24, 2014
A taxi driver and his three friends have been sentenced for a total of 68 years over the rape of a drunk passenger.
Tamseel Virk, 42, Najim U-Saeed, 31, Wakar Akhtar, 21, and Azad Raja, 38, were each handed 17 year jail terms for the ‘despicable’ attack on the vulnerable woman in Bradford, Yorkshire.
A judge heard how taxi driver Virk picked up the intoxicated victim after she had been out celebrating a friend’s birthday in Leeds.
When she came round, she found Raja was having sex with her – while Akhtar told her he had already had sex with her.
Virk, U-Saeed and Raja were sentenced at Bradford Crown Court. Akhtar was also sentenced but is currently on the run – and is believed to have fled the country after giving evidence, the court heard.
His Honour Judge Jonathan Durham Hall QC told the court that the victim had been enjoying herself earlier in the evening of May 25. But she ended up ‘coming to her senses on a park bench in another city being raped’.
Describing the victim’s experience as a nightmare, he told the three men in the dock: ‘This was totally despicable, it was utterly callous, it was a degree of inhuman behaviour hard, even for one such as myself inured to evil, to understand.’
During the two-week trial, in which the men denied conspiracy to rape, the court heard that the teacher had been drunk when she left the party without her bag and was seen at Leeds train station.
The judge said: ‘On that day, as was her right, she enjoyed at the birthday party a number of drinks. That is part, gentlemen, of our culture.’