Taxi Driver Convicted of Raping Two 13-Year-Olds...

A MAN has been convicted of raping two 13-year-old girls in the back of his car.

Munshar Ali, 22, of Bennett Street, Hyde, attacked the girls after picking them up on Old Road in the town, Manchester Crown Court heard

Ali denied raping one girl twice and the other once. But it was the girls’ version of events the jury accepted.

Nicola Gatto, prosecuting, said Ali, who works for a Stockport debt recovery agency, stopped the girls in his brother’s Ford Fiesta on 8 November and asked if they knew the way to Birmingham.

He offered them a lift and later stopped at a garage on Stockport Road, Guide Bridge, to withdraw £10 from a cashpoint and bought a bottle of vodka — which the girls sipped — and two cans of Fanta from a nearby shop. Afterwards Ali asked if they wanted to come back to his ‘nice big bed’, before dropping them near home.

He had the car valeted the next day. Both girls were medically examined but a doctor could not determine if a bruise and abrasion had been due to rape.

But Ali tried to convince the jury he had been the victim of a sexual assault. He said he had to perform an emergency stop after they ‘leapt’ in front of the car and asked for a lift to Denton as they were lost. On the way he said they kissed and hugged in the back seat, and, when he stopped the car, that they attempted to have sex with him.

But prosecutor Ms Gatto dubbed his account a ‘complete tissue of lies.’

Ali told the court the case had put his life on ‘standstill’ and jeopardised his arranged marriage. And the chairman of Hyde’s Jamia Mosque, in a reference read out by defence lawyer Mike Leeming, said Ali — of Bangladeshi descent — had done voluntary work with children, describing him as ‘honest, reliable and conscientious.’

Mr Leeming suggested the girls — who he said had drunk almost two bottles of wine between them shortly before the incident — fabricated the story to get the attention of a boyfriend one had recently split from. "He was the second person she texted that night to say she had been raped."

His Honour, Judge Peter Lakin, remanded Ali — who has a conviction for threatening behaviour from 2007 — in custody until sentencing on 28 August.