Libyan soldier denies raping man in Cambridge

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/12/libyan-soldier-denies-raping-man-in-cambridge

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One of two Libyan soldiers accused of raping a man while training in the UK has insisted his alleged victim initiated sexual contact.

Moktar Ali Saad Mahmoud, 33, and Ibrahim Abugtila, 23, deny raping, and aiding and abetting the rape of the man in his 20s in a Cambridge park on 26 October last year.

The pair were arrested while undergoing training at Bassingbourn Barracks in Cambridgeshire as part of an agreement by the British government to help Libya after the 2011 collapse of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.

Prosecutors have told Cambridge crown court that they acted like “hunting dogs” picking off their alleged victim, who was drunk and vulnerable, like a “wounded animal”. It is alleged that they took it in turns to hold the man down while the other raped him.

Giving evidence on Tuesday, Abugtila said he had arrived in the UK in June after joining the Libyan army six months earlier. Before that he had been part of the Libyan high security committee, which supports the police.

On the night of the alleged attack he had been turned away from a party at a nightclub in the city attended by some fellow Libyan soldiers. He found himself wandering the city’s streets drunk. At about 3.26am, he and Mahmoud struck up a conversation with the alleged victim, whom he claims he had met earlier in the night.

Speaking through an Arabic interpreter, Abugtila said: “I wanted to find a taxi but we went to a public garden to urinate under a tree. I saw the man approaching and thought he wanted to urinate.

“He started touching the area where my penis is over the top of my clothing.

I removed his hand from me and asked what are you doing. He was getting his face closer to me and kissed me on the lips.

I told him: ‘Do you want to have sex with me?’, he said: ‘Yes.’”

Abugtila described how he had sex with the man who then asked why he had finished. “I said maybe Moktar will have sex with you, I’ve had enough,” he added. “He went towards Moktar and it didn’t last long before he got on the top of Moktar.”

Both defendants accept they had sex with the man but say it was consensual. They say he concocted the story after stealing money from them.

The victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told officers: “I cannot believe what I’m saying, they raped me. It was horrible.” Describing them as “animals”, he added: “I was trying my hardest. I was trying my hardest and they were like overpowering me.”

The men’s arrests, along with those of three other men who have since admitted unrelated sex attacks and a “collapse of discipline” on the base, led to the abandonment of the Ministry of Defence’s project to support Libya’s embattled new government.

The trial is expected to conclude later this week.