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CCTV shows Boudjenane with his victim’s head on the bus |
‘There is no mitigation: You are a very dangerous person’
Harrowing details emerge of rape, murder and the transport of victim’s head on a bus
A HOMELESS man rummaging in an alleyway behind an arcade of shops made the first of the grim discoveries that led to the sentencing on Thursday of a 46-year-old man for murder, rape and false imprisonment.
Looking for food or objects he could sell in a quiet lane behind the Kilburn High Road, the man, in his 50s, came across a headless body wrapped in a duvet and tied up with gaffer tape.
Murder detectives, assisted by divers working in the Regent’s Canal, quickly found the head of 43-year-old Lakhdar Ouyahia, an Algerian who lived in Kingsgate Road, yards from where his remains had been discovered.
Then they found a Filipina nanny, beaten and with a shaven head, so traumatised that she had been unable to speak about a 14-hour ordeal of imprisonment, rape and torture.
They were connected by their association with a tiny patch of Kilburn and by a love triangle that existed only in the mind of the killer and rapist, Mohammed Boudjenane.
On Thursday, as he was sentenced to life, Boudjenane was told by Old Bailey Judge Christopher Moss QC: “There is no mitigation. You are a very dangerous individual and it will be for others to decide whether it will ever be safe to release you.”
Kingsgate Road, and the alley-like Kingsgate Place where the body was found, form a quiet backwater off the constant stream of the Kilburn High Road.
The Camden Council flat in which Boudjenane lived, claiming incapacity benefit after a failed asylum application in 2003, is on the corner of Kingsgate Road, tucked behind a newsagent and café on Quex Road.
It was here that Boudjenane lured the 42-year-old nanny, a woman he barely knew who went to a nearby church, threatening her with a kitchen knife and a Samurai sword, subjecting her to an ordeal that only ended when she placated him by agreeing to adopt his religion and marry him.
Lakhdar Ouyahia, a meter reader whose neighbours describe as hardworking and polite, lived upstairs.
Boudjenane believed that Mr Ouyahia – who did not know the woman he had just tortured – was his rival in her affections. Hours after the woman had fled, Boudjenane lured his neighbour into his flat to look at a supposed electric fault.
A post mortem showed that Boudjenane killed Mr Ouyahia with a blow to the head before decapitating him. After buying a suitcase and cleaning products in Kilburn High Road, CCTV footage shows that Boudjenane then calmly took the N98 bus to Little Venice carrying Mr Ouyahia’s head in a bag, to be dropped into the canal.
Through an interpreter, Judge Moss told Boudjenane: “Throughout the afternoon and evening of February 3 this year you brutalised that woman having taken her off the street.
“You were obsessed with her and left her black and blue, traumatised and terrified. Then you murdered a man you wrongly perceived as a rival. You insulted his body and tried to dismember him.”
From the day he was arrested in Derby within a week of the grisly discoveries, Boudjenane claimed that he killed Mr Ouyahia while he was mentally ill.
Paranoia and schizophrenia, his lawyers said during his trial, had meant he was out of control during the crimes.
But the claims were successfully refuted by prosecutor William Boyce QC: “He has been trying to make himself look odd. He has faked illness previously to get economic advantages like a flat and benefits.
“Sexual jealousy led him to punish the woman and then it was the man’s turn. But he wasn’t going to be allowed to live.
“This was premeditated murder.”
After the harrowing trial, the bravery of Boudjenane’s female victim drew the praise of the murder squad investigator in the case, Detective Chief Inspector Jessica Wadsworth.
She said: “I find it hard to even imagine the trauma of those 14 hours that [the victim] was kept captive, the fear she experienced while being beaten, tied up, raped and having her hair shaved off.
“She fully expected to meet her death and realises how lucky she was to escape. She has been forced to relive those harrowing events over three days in court.
“Throughout it all she has shown amazing strength of character and I have the utmost respect for her.”
From his first appearance at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court to the day of his conviction, Boudjenane was impassive in the dock. When the judge handed down sentences totalling 55 years for rape and false imprisonment as well as a life sentence for murder, he showed no emotion as he was led to the cells. |
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