Taxi driver jailed for raping student in 2006

Mahbubur Rahman was found guilty of one count of rape

A man who raped a 19-year-old student in the back of his taxi has been jailed nearly two decades after committing the crime.

Mahbubur Rahman, 50, picked up his victim, who was trying to get back to a party in Loughborough, Leicestershire, in the early hours of 6 October 2006.

Although she reported the attack at the time, the driver was not identified, and the case was closed in 2009, before a DNA sample collected from Rahman for an unrelated matter in 2022 matched that taken from the student.

At Leicester Crown Court on Wednesday, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Rahman, of Jane Street in Chadderton, Oldham, had been found guilty of one count of rape by a jury last month following a four-day trial.

Standing in the dock next to an interpreter, he was told he would serve two thirds of his sentence in custody, minus the time he had spent on remand, and the rest of it on licence.

Victim suffers flashbacks

The court was told the victim was out with friends in Loughborough when she became intoxicated and was denied entry to a nightclub.

A friend put her in a taxi, which got her back home safely but she later wanted to rejoin her friends.

That is when Rahman - who was 31 at the time - picked her up, although he was not supposed to take fares from the street, Judge Rebecca Herbert said.

After stopping at a cash machine, Rahman drove the victim to a car park, before raping her in the back of his car.

Left without a shoe, her handbag and underwear, she walked back to her student accommodation and told her housemates what had happened.

The court heard the victim was "curled in a ball on the floor" and "completely hysterical".

While her recollection of the night was hazy, a recurring memory of the victim was of a man on top of her in the back of a taxi, "causing her pain", the judge said.

During the trial, Rahman claimed the victim had asked him for money in exchange for sex.

Before his DNA was recovered, another driver - who got the victim back safely earlier that night - had been arrested for Rahman's crime.

"One can only imagine the stress that would have caused him," the judge told the court.

Sentencing Rahman, the judge said he took advantage of a "young girl in a new city", and while he was able to move on with his life and have three children and a wife, the victim still suffered flashbacks and "lives in fear".

"You blighted her life," she told Rahman.