A Pakistani asylum seeker who raped an 18-year-old woman in a Nottinghamshire park, less than a year after arriving in the UK, has been jailed for ten years following a trial that was initially subject to reporting restrictions concealing his immigration status.
Sheraz Malik, 28, previously of Bath Street in Sutton-in-Ashfield, was found guilty of two counts of rape by a jury at Birmingham Crown Court in January, following the attack on 29 June last year in Sutton Lawn park. On Thursday he was sentenced to 10 years in custody plus four years on extended licence, after Judge Simon Ash KC ruled he posed “a significant risk” to the public.
The court heard the victim had been drinking in the park with a male friend when she met Malik and a group of other men she did not know. Her friend asked the group to “look after” her while he went to meet someone else. When one of the men took her to an isolated part of the park so she could use the toilet, he raped her — that man has not yet been identified. Malik then “decided he wished to have sex with her” and took his turn taking her to a secluded spot, where prosecution counsel Nicholas Corsellis KC said he “physically struck her while raping her.”
Sentencing, Judge Ash said Malik had attacked the woman knowing she was very drunk and had been left alone at night with men she did not know. “When she tried to resist, you hit her hard to the face and head,” he told Malik. He noted that Malik had repeatedly called the woman “a slut” after the attack, adding: “Some of the things you said to her did amount to additional degradation and humiliation of her.”
A pre-sentence report found Malik displayed “distorted thinking in relation to consent, personal entitlement and the objectification of women,” the judge said, adding: “Rather than feeling empathy towards her, you appear to feel only hostility and anger towards her.” Malik showed no remorse and had not taken responsibility for the assault, maintaining throughout his trial that he had been playing cricket and smoking cannabis in the park beforehand and denying he had hit the woman, while claiming the sex had been consensual.
The court was told Malik was born in Pakistan and had lived in France, Germany and Italy before arriving in the UK less than 12 months before the attack. A reporting restriction imposed at Nottingham Crown Court in September last year prevented any mention of his immigration status until the conclusion of the trial. The sentencing hearing was told his asylum case has not yet been considered by the Home Office.
The BBC, which first reported the case, noted the verdict and sentencing bring to a close one strand of the investigation, while police continue efforts to identify the second man responsible for the earlier assault on the same victim that night.
