Camden News: Head-in-canal | 'sex victim's ordeal | QC Old Bailey

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Camden News - DAVID ST GEORGE
Published: 23 October 2008

Head-in-canal jury told of ‘sex victim’s ordeal’

‘Attack hours before murder’ – QC

A MAN accused of killing his neighbour and dumping his severed head in a canal had earlier abducted a woman as she walked to a church choir class, the Old Bailey has heard.
Prosecutor William Boyce QC said the woman managed to talk her way out of Mohamed Boudjenane’s home after an 11-hour ordeal in which she was beaten and sexually assaulted.
But within hours of this attack, it is claimed Mr Boudjenane turned his attention to Lakhdar Ouyahia, who lived in the flat above him in Kingsgate Road, Kilburn.
Mr Ouyahia, 43, died after being hit on the head with an object believed to be a claw hammer. His head was recovered in February from a canal near Maida Vale by police divers. The rest of his body was found wrapped in bedding and stuffed into a cage outside a supermarket also in Kilburn.
The court heard Mr Boudjenane wrongly believed Mr Ouyahia had been sleeping with the woman he had abducted.
Mr Boudjenane denies murder, false imprisonment and two counts of rape. Yesterday (Wednesday) the woman involved, a housekeeper from Oxford, completed two days of evidence over a video link to a jury.
She described in graphic detail a whole series of alleged sex assaults by the Algerian accused, who has been assisted by an interpreter in the dock since the start of his trial on Monday.
At first she believed, she said, that “he was my friend”.
She added: “Once inside the flat he made me strip naked and kept me locked in.
“He screamed and shouted at me to force me to submit. He took all my clothes. He hacked off my hair and flushed it down the toilet with my sim card. He also threatened to stab me and torture me with boiling fat, but that didn’t happen.”
Mr Boyce said: “She was very fortunate to escape with her life. It was the defendant’s plan to kill her but she talked her way out of it. He was giving the impression he was going to kill her.”
Today (Thursday) she will be quizzed by defence QC Orlando Pownall.

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