Four Afghan nationals who fled the UK in the back of a lorry after the gang rape of a teenage girl they had groomed have been sentenced to detention.
Mehrab Safi, 21, Salman Habibkheil and Awal Ahmadzai, both 19, along with a 17-year-old boy who cannot be named, attacked the 17-year-old at a house in Bristol in November last year.
The victim told the court she had wanted to go home, but had been given vodka and cigarettes before the attack.
Safi, Ahmadzai and Habibkheil left the UK in December, filming themselves apparently celebrating their escape from inside a lorry. French authorities later found them in Calais.
After they were returned to Britain, the men were convicted of offences including rape following a trial at Bristol Crown Court earlier this year.
Judge Michael Cullum sentenced Safi to 15 years in prison after he was convicted of two counts of rape and one count of human trafficking.
Habibkheil received nine years in detention for one count of rape and one count of human trafficking. Ahmadzai was also sentenced to nine years in detention after being convicted of one count of rape and one count of sexual assault.
The 17-year-old defendant, who cannot be identified because of his age, was sentenced to three years in detention for one count of rape.
The victim first met Safi while Christmas shopping with a friend in Bristol city centre.
Passing sentence, Judge Cullum said: ‘She clearly did not know Bristol well and appeared keen to drink alcohol, potentially with people she did not know.
‘She would have appeared vulnerable from the outset, and I have no doubt that this was partly what attracted you to her, Safi.’
Safi attempted to persuade both girls to go to his property by offering drugs and somewhere to charge their phones. They refused and returned home.
However, Safi and the victim exchanged social media details. He then began an ‘intense exchange’ of messages with her on Snapchat, where he asked her to send nude photographs.
Awal Ahmadzai (left), Salman Habibkheil (centre), both 19, Mehrab Safi, 21, (right) and a 17-year-old boy who cannot be named attacked a 17-year-old girl at a house in Bristol in November last year
Four days later, on November 30, the girl’s mother went out for the evening and Safi suggested that she travel to Bristol.
Safi and Habibkheil arranged for a taxi to pick her up from her home in Somerset and take her to the city.
She was taken to Safi’s house, where the men supplied her with enough alcohol to make her drunk before each of them raped her.
The victim was raped and sexually assaulted by the four defendants over a period of several hours.
‘Having been trafficked for the purpose of committing a sexual offence, she was raped five times and subjected to a penetrative sexual assault by Ahmadzai,’ the judge said.
‘The cumulative trauma caused by these offences will undoubtedly remain with her forever and is unimaginable.’
He continued: ‘The victim was obviously vulnerable and that’s why you all preyed on her.’
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The judge said the girl had been provided with alcohol and cigarettes, which had the effect of ‘grooming her and trapping her, though not physically’.
She was ‘plied with drink until very significantly affected’, with the defendants getting her drunk to increase her vulnerability and the prospect she ‘would not or could not resist’, he added.
Being raped by multiple men, one after another, left her ‘broken beyond resistance’, the judge said.
During the trial, jurors watched a video of the victim in a police interview following the attack.
The footage showed she had told Safi she did not want to have sex with him at that point, but he went on to rape her anyway.
Habibkheil then raped her before Ahmadzai and the 17-year-old boy did the same.
She told police: ‘I just wanted to go home. I didn’t feel safe. I just wanted to go home. I didn’t like it. I just wanted to be at home.’
The girl said she had been asleep during two of the alleged rapes and while being sexually assaulted.
Jurors heard how the girl’s mother raised the alarm when she was not at home, with police tracing her to a house in the St Werburghs area of Bristol.
Officers arrested the teenage boy when he answered the door to the property, while the three older men fled as police arrived.
Addressing the defendants, the judge described how they had suffered trauma but this did not excuse what they had caused to the victim in the case.
‘Each of the four reports gives some details as to the exact causes of the trauma that you each have suffered in relation to fleeing Afghanistan and travelling to the UK,’ he said.
‘I’m not going to repeat the detail in these sentencing remarks but I do take it into account.’
Edd Hetherington, prosecuting, read a victim personal statement from the girl and summarised a statement made by her mother.
The girl described how she was “a different person” following the attacks, and had stopped going out by herself.
“Generally, my brain keeps blocking out the trauma that happened to me but when I am feeling low emotionally it all comes back and makes me feel even worse,” she said.
“Going through the court process has made it so much worse again, as listening to it all again from the lawyers kept me re-living everything that happened to me.
“I had to take breaks to cry, it was all really traumatic as my brain could not block it all out as it usually does.”
The girl said she had planned to go to college and work in a nursery with children, but her anxiety is now so bad she has had to “put a hold on to that dream”.
She told the court she had been “glad and relieved” when the defendants were convicted, as she had been “scared that they would get away with what they have done”.
Her mother said the girl was “anxious of anyone who looks similar to the defendants” and had lost trust in strangers.