LONDON: Two teenage Afghan asylum seekers, who had both arrived in Britain alone in the last year, were given long detention sentences on Monday for raping a 15-year-old girl in central England.
The boys, Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal, both aged 17, carried out the attack in a park in Leamington Spa in May after taking the girl, who was very drunk at the time, away from her friends, prosecutors told Warwick Crown Court. The court was played footage that the highly distressed girl had managed to capture during the attack, in which she could be heard sobbing loudly and screaming: “Please help me ... let me go ... I want to go home.”
“The day I was raped changed me as a person,” the girl, who said the incident was her first sexual experience, said in a victim statement. Jahanzeb, who turns 18 at the start of next year, was given detention of 10 years and eight months, while Niazal was sentenced to nine years and 10 months in detention.
Jahanzeb’s lawyer Robert Holt said his client had travelled through Europe alone to get to Britain in January, succeeding on his fourth attempt to cross the Channel on a small boat. He faces automatic deportation after his sentence is completed. Joshua Radcliffe, the lawyer for Niazal, said he had come alone to Britain last November to escape the Taliban, who had murdered his father, formerly in the Afghan army.
