I don't even buy this excuse for a second. I've never heard that in Muslim countries any man can grab any child off the street and rape her. Had he been back home and grabbed the local imam's daughter off the street and raped her becuase she's "worthless" he would be hanged within a week. And he knows it.
In Saudi Arabia they do this with the non-Saudi women all the time. There they kill some of them to hide their crimes. They get away with it because the women are usually terrified to report them to the authorities.
You are correct that if they grab the wrong woman that they will be punished severly.
When I worked in Yemen, we had a document control clerk who was from Somalia. One of the stories he told me was of he and 3 friends gang raping a girl a few years younger than they were as teenagers. He thought she was 13 and he was 16 if he remembered it correctly. The girl was someone from his village and they all knew each other.
The guy had gone on to be quite educated, he had been veterinarian before Muhammad Siad Barre fled Mogadishu and the rebels took over. He fluently spoke and wrote in Arabic, French, English and another that I forget. He was devote in his Muslim faith and we talked about differences from Christianity and Judaism.
I am trying to explain, that although I didn't agree with his beliefs, at the time (1993), I respected the man. He worked hard, he worked at a job well beneath his abilities because it was all the work he could get where he was.
When he told me that story, after we had worked around each other for many months, he laughed. He, now in his 40's, still thought it was a funny story. It is hard to convey in words how strange a dichotomy that he thought that a normal thing that kids might do.