Three immigrants have been found guilty of gang-raping a German backpacker in a van in Auckland on New Year’s Day last year before dumping her onto the street outside her hostel.
The rapists were found guilty by a High Court jury on Wednesday after a two-and-a-half-week trial, but Justice Mathew Downs continued a name suppression order until sentencing in May in order to give their lawyers time to apply for a permanent order.
This means the trio, who immigrated from the same “war-torn country” in 2021 according to local media, and were on bail until the trial, cannot be legally identified until then, and if a permanent order is granted their names and nationality will never be revealed to the public.
The men, called B, O, and S in court, were each charged with three counts of rape, one for being the main offender and two for aiding or encouraging the others. B and O were convicted of all three counts, but S was only found guilty of the principal charge, The New Zealand Herald reported.
The trial heard the 19-year-old tourist, who has only patchy memories of the night, was heavily intoxicated when she met B on the dancefloor of the Family Bar on Karangahape Road in Central Auckland.
She was then led outside where O and S were waiting for a signal, and the pair then pulled up in a van belonging to a mutual friend, which was opened from the inside.
The men then drove their victim to the empty carpark of an aluminium business in an industrial estate in Avondale where CCTV showed B was already naked and on top of the woman in the middle row of seats, with O looking back from the driver’s seat, when they arrived.
O then walked around the van and “waited his turn” at the middle door before raping the woman seconds after B, and S then climbed onto the woman’s row of seats from the back of the van and raped her also.
The CCTV showed B get back on top of the woman to rape her again, and the court heard the trio watched each other, encouraged each other, and took photos.
The prosecution said the victim was likely unconscious for most of the ordeal, and the court heard she told a police interviewer that at one point she woke up and found herself being raped by a stranger while other men spoke a foreign language she didn’t recognise.
At 4.21am she was pushed out of the van 35 metres from her backpacker accommodation without her underwear, and a sexual assault physician said a proper medical examination was not possible due to the victim’s “grossly swollen” genitalia, which was the worst she had ever seen.
The rapists all denied the charges, with B claiming he only engaged in consensual non-penetrative sexual activity, O admitting to intercourse but claiming the victim propositioned him, and S claiming he was asleep in the backseat throughout the 10-minute attack.
DNA testing from S was inconclusive, but a witness said he had bragged about all three men having sex with a drunk woman. B’s DNA was found on the inside crotch of the woman’s clothes, and O’s was found during the gynaecological exam.
B claimed he hugged the woman after dropping her off, and O told the court the victim was not only happy when she got out, but was thankful for the ride and apologised to the men for giving them the wrong address, which he also said explained how they ended up in the carpark.
However, witnesses from the hostel said the victim repeatedly told one friend “you don’t know what they did to me”, was so inconsolable she tried to run into traffic, and needed to be taken to hospital in an ambulance.
Her blood alcohol level was double the legal driving limit when tested at 8.40am, and a toxicologist estimated it could have been four times the limit or higher during the rape.
While with B before ushered into the van she texted her friends “gilde”, which she said was a misspelling of the German word for help, hilfe, and after the rape she texted “can someone please help me?”
Lawyers for B and O argued the woman was consenting, and that the CCTV footage was inconclusive, and suggested she “might have felt silly” at the end of the night, as the men “didn’t treat her particularly nicely afterwards”.
S’s lawyer told the jury that even if the witness was telling the truth about his boasts, it could have been a case of a man exaggerating to his mates.
The defence suggested the “gilde” text meant “team” or “group”, but the woman testified the word was outdated and she had never used it. O also tried to explain the second text for help as her asking for help finding the hostel address.
But Crown prosecutor Fiona Culliney said “no reasonable, sober person” could have believed the victim was consenting, and pointed to a number of lies told by each of the men either in police interviews or in court.
“The idea that this young backpacker … would want to be driven off to some dark, deserted part of the city … to have sex with these three young men – it just defies logic,” she said in her closing address to the jury.
She called the men’s claims their memories were hazy because it was their first time drinking a “calculated” cover story, said if they just wanted to drive the woman back to her hostel they could have taken O’s car instead of the friend’s van, and referenced CCTV showing O and S sprinting to the van while B kept the victim near the nightclub.
Ms Culliney also called O’s claim that he didn’t know S was in the van a “whopper of a lie” shown to be “ludicrous” by the CCTV footage, and noted B looked up sexual assault statistics on the Ministry of Justice website the next day, saying “it’s hardly something you do if you’ve just had an incredible, consensual interaction with a girl”.
B, O and S were interviewed as persons of interest after the attack and released, but when they were arrested and charged in late January police did not oppose bail as they had already been allowed to walk free and were given name suppression, sparking outrage in New Zealand at the time.
They were remanded in custody after the verdict and face up to 20 years in jail.
Header image: Family Bar in Auckland (Google Street View).
The post Three migrants from ‘war-torn country’ guilty of gang-raping German tourist in New Zealand first appeared on The Noticer.
The NoticerRead More
R1
T1
