AMOURA: KNIFEPOINT RAPIST NEEDS PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENT

A teenager who raped a trainee architect at knifepoint as she walked home at night is facing detention in a psychiatric hospital.

Dimeck Amoura, 18, followed the 29-year-old woman down the street and bundled her to the ground.

Amoura pulled out a blade, tripped her up, and slashed at her clothing.

He repeatedly throttled her, smashed her head against the pavement by her hair and punched her in the face during the ordeal in Nunhead, southeast London.

Amoura, of no fixed address, was arrested fleeing the scene after a member of the public called police to the disturbance in the early hours of June 6 last year, Inner London Crown Court heard.

He faced one charge of rape, one charge of robbery and one of assault by penetration but was deemed unfit to plead and a jury decided he ‘did the act’.

The victim told the jury how she had spent the day shopping, drinking in the sunshine, and dancing at a bar before making her way home at about 3am.

Her friends walked her to the night bus and she boarded alone before walking home  down backstreets.

‘I became aware of someone being behind me and so I looked round,’ said the woman.

‘There was someone there walking quite close to me.

‘I turned around again and started walking a bit quicker.

‘I got a bit scared.

‘The next thing I remember, he grabbed me and he said that he had a gun.

‘I looked down and he was holding a knife to my side.’

Her attacker took her handbag ‘grabbed hold of me again and hooked his legs around my legs and forced me to onto the floor,’ she added.

‘I remember begging him to let me go and saying that: ‘You’ve got what you want, I just wanna go home’.’

‘Every time I tried to talk he grabbed my throat and squeezed my voice box.

‘Sometimes I couldn’t breathe.

‘Then he tried to start bargaining.

‘He started saying: ‘I just want sex. Then I’ll let you go.’

‘I didn’t know what to do.

‘I was scared for my life.

‘He got the knife and slashed my tights and slashed my top.

‘He was straddling me.’

He then touched her intimately and ‘undid his trousers’, she said.

She added: ‘I remember him punching me in the face, he grabbed my hair and slammed my head into the pavement repeatedly.

‘He started looking round me, seeming more agitated.

‘He started saying that he was gonna come back in two minutes.

‘I tried to sit up to pull my tights and knickers up and he pushed me back down again.

‘He said if I tried to leave he’d kill me.’

The woman told how she saw up to three people running towards them and her attacker fled. She ran off too and hid behind a wall to call the police.

Judge Usha Karu adjourned sentence until July 29.
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