An asylum seeker from Afghanistan has been jailed for twice raping a 12-year-old girl with learning disabilities in a migrant hotel in London.
Sakhidad Ahadi, 25, was sentenced at the Croydon Crown Court to twelve years in prison for grooming and raping a 12-year-old refugee from Albania, however, he will likely only serve eight years behind bars before being considered for parole.
During the trial, Ahadi maintained that he was also 12 years old, despite evidence that he was in fact 25 years old. His lawyers also tried to argue that due to his upbringing in rural Afghanistan, he believed his young victim was 19 as “perceiving age may not be so clear to someone who has grown up in mountainous Afghanistan.” Judge Anthony Dunne said that he found this explanation “implausible”.
Describing the heinous acts, the judge said per the Daily Mail: “You touched her and took her pants off and you raped her first when she was face-down and a medical examination revealed you tore her.
“Despite her young age and obvious distress you turned her over and after you finished there was a mess on the bed, which you cleaned up with toilet paper.
“She told you her real age and that she was twelve years old. She denied that she told you she was aged nineteen and her version of events have been proved. The jury concluded that she was telling the truth and that you were lying.”
The convicted rapist and his victim were both placed by the government in the historic Queens Hotel in Crystal Palace, London, which has since begun to be referred to locally as “Hotel Asylum” as it has been taken over to house migrants while their asylum claims, something that has become common across England following the coronavirus and the migrant crisis in the English Channel.
Ahadi claimed that he came to the UK to escape persecution from the Taliban, claiming that the Islamic fundamentalist group had shot him and killed his father for refusing to join their ranks.
The girl victim, alongside her brother, was brought to the UK by their mother from their native Albania. According to prosecutors, the 12-year-old girl suffers from a learning disability, which they said made her even more vulnerable to grooming.
The victim told the court: “I feel super-stressed, suffer emotional outbursts and I am crying all the time. I stay awake at night and feel someone is chasing me.”
Her mother added: “The sky has fallen in on my head and destroyed me. We came to this country for safety and I did not want anything like this to happen to my children.”
The judge determined that Ahadi “showed no remorse” over the rapes and continues to pose a “significant risk to the public” and therefore ordered an extended sentence of three years on license following his release. The Afghani will also remain on the sex offenders registry for the rest of his life.