Taxi rape earns five-year sentence

Passenger was assaulted while drunk after she could not come up with fare for the journey, prosecutors say.

DUBAI // A taxi driver was sentenced to five years in prison today for raping a British woman.

The driver, SG, 47, had denied the charges at the Dubai Criminal Court of First Instance, saying the victim was drunk and offered herself to him after getting locked outside her parents' house without money for taxi fare.

Prosecutors said SG raped the woman in the backseat of a Dubai Transport taxi on March 5, 2010, last year in the Springs gated community.

The complaint was reported to Jebel Ali police at 5am on the day of the incident. A police officer testified that when he arrived, he  found the woman with her parents in a distraught and drunken state.

The victim, according to the officers, did not have any physical signs of assault but was disheveled, with trousers worn inside-out.

She told police she had caught a taxi at Chi nightclub. She said that when she arrived at her parents' house, she asked the driver to wait while she went to collect money, but the door was locked.

After numerous attempts at ringing the bell, the woman returned to the taxi and used the driver's mobile to call her mother.

She testified she finally told him to come back in the morning to collect his fare, but he jumped into the backseat and raped her.

Her mother told prosecutors that she woke up to a commotion outside her house and found her daughter banging on the door asking her to call 999.

The mother, 61-year-old FS, told prosecutors her daughter told her she had fought off the taxi driver, scratching his face.

Police officers said the driver was arrested after the community's security guard provided them with the taxi plate number. But officers testified there were

no visible signs of a struggle on his face or hands.

However evidence from the backseat of the taxi and the victim's clothes showed genetic material from SG.

SG will be deported after serving his jail term, the court said.