Daily Mail
October 23, 2014
A schoolgirl who was repeatedly raped in a 90-minute ordeal overheard by her mother has bravely waived her right to anonymity to speak out against her attacker.
Paige Bilclough was 15 when she was attacked at knifepoint by Abdul Miah, then 19, on a piece of wasteland in Newcastle.
As he assaulted her, he told her: ‘You will always be the girl that got raped and no-one will like you.’
But today the 17-year-old from Newcastle’s West End said: ‘He’s the one that should be ashamed – he has lost everything and is behind bars while I want to be a singer and am getting on with my life.
Miss Bilclough was walking from a youth club to her aunt’s house in the city’s Rye Hill in December 2012 when Miah walked up to her, put a knife to her throat, and marched her down a dark alleyway to a secluded piece of wasteland.
He then stuck his knife in a tree, ordered her to strip, and kept her there for an hour and a half, raping her three times.
‘He just told me to take my clothes off,’ she said. ‘I was frozen and scared but I tried to do everything he said just so he wouldn’t stab me.
‘When you are in that situation you just focus on surviving. Before it happened to me I thought I would have fought back, but you just do what you have to do to survive.’
The attack was overheard by her mother who, worried about her daughter not coming back, had called her mobile. When the phone was answered, she heard a man’s mumbles instead of her daughter’s voice.
After the attack, during which Miah tried to degrade Miss Bilclough by telling her her life was ruined, he ordered her to dress and told her to empty her bag before grabbing cash and her phone and fleeing.
Sobbing, she fled to her aunt’s house and reported the attack to police. Detectives found CCTV images of him in a hooded top walking along the street and his knife was recovered from the scene.
Miah, of Elswick, was arrested five days later after police matched his DNA to a saliva sample taken when he was arrested in 2008 for taking a knife to his school Excelsior Academy.
He admitted three counts of rape, robbery, and having a knife, and was jailed for 12 years in May last year.