IVANOV: STUDENTS FACING JAIL FOR GANG RAPE FILMED ON PHONE
Four Russian pupils at an exclusive boarding school are facing jail today (Mon) after they were convicted of gang-raping a fellow student and filming her ordeal on an iPhone.
Oleg Ivanov and Gregory Andreev Melnikov, both 23, Norayr Davtyan, 22, and Armen Simonyan, 19, took turns to rape the 18-year-old after plying her with whisky in their dormitory.
All four were students at exclusive Bellerby’s College in South London – an international ‘university preparation’ institution which charges pupils fees of up to £30,000 a year.
They had arrived in Britain just two weeks before the attack.
One of the attackers said the victim was a ‘machine for ****ing,’ during the attack.
Police believe the victim may have had her drink spiked with ‘stupefying drugs’ before she was raped.
The four students now face years behind bars after they were convicted of rape following an eight week trial at Woolwich Crown Court.
Judge Peter Murphy adjourned sentencing until tomorrow afternoon.
The night before the rape on January 21 this year, Davtyan, Ivanov and Simonyan videoed each other on their phones bragging about what they planned to do to the victim.
The following evening, the college put on a disco for its students, while Davtyan also held an impromptu party in his room.
The victim went to the room between 7pm and 8pm and downed a shot of whiskey before going back to the main building.
Prosecutor Peter Clement said: ‘Not long after she left Mr Davtyan’s room she began to feel funny, dizzy, peculiar, and different to how she might usually feel.’
CCTV cameras captured her stumbling though the main entrance before later filming her in an outdoor smoking area talking to Ivanov and Melnikov.
She was later seen walking away from the smoking area with Melnikov when she was taken to the party in Davtyan’s room.
Once there she was seen to vomit and lie down on the floor, and as the party wound down she was eventually left alone with the four men.
Video footage recovered from Davtyan’s iPhone taken between 12.38am and 3.10am then showed all four men attacking the girl.
Mr Clement said: ‘It is real time evidence provided by the defendants themselves, not only of what they were doing to that girl but, importantly, also their attitude towards her and indeed how, in truth, she really was.
‘Relatively early on Mr Ivanov says is Russian ‘She’s crying’, it did not deter him or any of the others.
‘At one point Mr Ivanov said he felt pity for her, but this was only after he and the others had sex with her.
‘He was talked out of that attitude by Mr Davtyan who described [the girl] as just a whore and a machine for f******’.’
The victim told police she remembered going to Davtyan’s flat after the disco and having a second shot of whisky and being sick.
Mr Clement said: ‘The next thing she recalled was waking up, now naked, with Mr Davtyan on top of her having sexual intercourse.’
She told police: ‘I just wanted to close my eyes. I just wanted to die.’
After their arrest all four men gave differing accounts of the events of that night, but all four denied raping the girl and claimed any sex had been consensual.
Ivanov, Melnikov, Davtyan, Simonyan, all of Bounty House, Stowage, Deptford, southeast London, all denied two counts of rape.
The jury of seven men and four women unanimously convicted Davtyan of two counts of rape.
They convicted Melnikov of one count of rape but found him not guilty of the other, instead finding him guilty of an alternative charge of attempted rape.
Ivanov and Simonyan were both convicted of one rape count and acquitted of the second.
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