Posted on 04/30/2006 3:43:08 AM PDT by Heatseeker
A WOMAN who was dragged from the street and raped at knifepoint by a foreign criminal freed from jail has called on Charles Clarke, the home secretary, to resign.
Her attacker was allowed to go free by immigration officials who could have deported him after he finished serving a three-year jail term for robbery.
The 40-year-old mother, who has been mentally scarred by the ordeal and has undergone intensive counselling, said her attacker "did not deserve to be alive".
She said: "It has taken me a long time to get beyond this. It is something that will always be there. Clarke must go. It is not something that he should even be considering. It is just ‘yes, you were wrong, now go’.
"This man should not even have been in the country. I only found out afterwards that he had committed other crimes and been in prison, too. It was just one unbelievable thing after another. Now this is the most unbelievable of the lot.
"What happened to me is a prime example (of incompetence). And if it has happened to me it has happened to hundreds of other people and will happen again until this government does something about it."
The woman, a nursing auxiliary who cannot be named for legal reasons, is the first victim to speak publicly in the freed-immigrants scandal engulfing the government.
She was attacked in her home city of Sheffield by Abdulrahmam Osman, a 31-year-old Somali, a year after he had been released from a jail sentence for robbery. Osman, who has a string of previous convictions, held a knife to her throat, dragged her into bushes and raped her.
In September 2004, she had been walking home from a nightclub in the early hours with her teenage daughter. Within minutes of their parting, Osman struck. “He just chose me at random; I had never seen him before. Until he got two or three feet away from me I didn’t realise he had a knife, and he was in my face by then.
"He came at me with his hand near my mouth and the knife under my chin. He said something like ‘Shut the f*** up’ and called me a ‘bitch’. My initial thought was that he was going to kill me, not rape me. I was in shock and all I could think at the time was, ‘I hope he doesn’t hurt me’.
"He pushed me backwards and I was stumbling backwards and then that was it, I was on my back."
The rape took place in bushes at the side of a main road. She said: "It’s hard to say how long it lasted, seconds really, but then he hung around afterwards and it was obvious he wasn’t really going to go. He actually followed me all the way to where I live."
The woman, who feared being raped a second time, only escaped by claiming that her boyfriend was about to turn up, which eventually frightened Osman off.
Afterwards, she had difficulty coping. "At the beginning I hated him and felt that if I came face to face with him I would stab him and kill him, but now I don’t feel anything about him at all because he doesn’t deserve emotion.
"I can actually see the end of the walkway where it happened from my kitchen window. It used to remind me of what I went through every time I washed the dishes, but therapy has helped me with that."
At his sentencing last April, Osman was described by the judge as "wicked" and "a real danger to the community". He was jailed for nine years for the rape and given another year for an earlier sexual assault.
"At the court case I couldn’t be seen by (Osman) because I was behind a screen and only the judge and jury could see me, but my then boyfriend and my daughter said he was smug. My boyfriend stared at him and he smiled at him."
The woman, who had to undergo HIV tests after the attack, was disappointed with the leniency of the sentence. "Nine years is not enough, not considering he’d done similar things before and that he had the cheek and audacity to do something worse when he was already charged (with sexual assault)."
Osman was marked out as a dangerous criminal soon after he arrived in Britain as a refugee. In 2001 he robbed a teenager and was jailed for three years. Home Office sources insisted he was reviewed by immigration officials for deportation but allowed to remain in Britain. Although Somalia is a war-torn country, it is possible to deport prisoners if they are considered a significant threat to public safety.
Within months he was reoffending, being convicted of possessing a knife in 2003 and threatening behaviour in July 2004. Weeks later, and just two months before the rape, he had begun targeting women walking home at night. On July 18 he exposed himself to a woman and was arrested within minutes and charged, but allowed to go free on bail pending trial.
Last week the Home Office admitted it had allowed 1,023 foreign prisoners to be released without considering whether they should be deported. As a result, none had been removed from the country, leaving them free to reoffend.
On Friday the Home Office admitted five overseas nationals, who were among 79 dangerous offenders released from jail since 1999, had been reconvicted of a series of violent crimes.
Two other ex-prisoners have been accused of sexual offences, including one rape which was said to have happened since August, after Clarke was informed of the fiasco, though last night Home Office officials denied it.
Clarke has admitted the oversights by immigration officials are "shocking" but Blair has said they do not warrant a resignation.
The rape victim said: "It’s a big enough issue (for Clarke) to resign over and a bigger one than many others have been forced to resign over."
The filthy moose might have thought her a slut for showing an elbow or something.
Just raping the women the English will not rape.
Great Job, you big failures in Britain. The British people better take these matters into their own hands and turn these failures out of office. They need to demand law and order before anything else. And they need to round up these criminals and THROW THEM OUT. They are a freaking ISLAND, they should have good control of who enters their land. If this requires changes to their laws, well let them get it done. They don't have the hindrence of a written constitution, so it shouldn't be a big deal to change what needs to be changed, if anything.
Don't confuse the majority of the British people with their political class. The tragic thing is the Conservative Party has not presented an alternative. Watch the upcoming council elections (think municipal/county level) for the performance of the BNP.
I'm not sure that's even the issue here. There is no need for new laws to address this, this is a simple matter of competence or lack of.
Doesn't England have a decent guest worker program? I'd say no, or this never would have happened.
Yes if the English people would not allowed themselfs to be disarmed. This thug might of been taken care of during the first crime. Or this lady might of taken care of him this time preventing who knows how many other crimes.
They elected them.
True, but when you have to choose between stupid and crazy, it's not much of a choice.
The woman is an infidel. Fair game in the eyes of the Muslim world. So am I. I want them dead, and since cartoons and diplomacy aren't going to do it, Iran or Iraq is fine by me.
You know...if she had just had a gun and could protect herself she wouldn't have to rely on the government to do the right thing.... just a thought.
Deporting the Muslim would be a very serious offense to Diversity and Tolerance.
And we know that we can't have any of that.
It is interesting that to the vast majority of college educated females, diversity and tolerance are just about the highest values. Most are completely oblivious of the consequential personal security risk that ultimate results from this nonsense. They just continue to vote for liberals.
We will have no reason left to critisize England's refusal to prosecute those who terrorize their citizens....
imo
This is a favorite behavior of Muslim criminals to show their absolute contempt for infidels. Why in the world would any civilized country allow them to immigrate, or when discovered, allow them to stay? It's mind boggling.
Just to clarify thi situation for all your US boys and girls out there.
The Home Office is just being run by an absolute muppet. Charles Clarke couldn't organise a shag in a brothel. All he wants to do is take away more and more of our civil liberties with such crap as ID cards, on the pretext that they will stop terrorist attacks. Total bollax. He should resign asap, and he will in the long run.
Oh and to the chap who suggested we should legalise guns in the UK. Just look at Dunblane for what happens when guns get into a society. We have enough gang problems in the UK without making it legal for them to carry firearms.
In Florida, we have concealed weapons permits, and carry a lot of guns. Why is it that England has a higher gun crime rate that us?
The yob problems in the UK are focused around the destruction of the community and the police being tied up with far too much paperwork and targets to hit each month. Give the police a free reign to conuct their business, without sticking them to targets and the conditions will improve. Instilling a sense of civic pride in the local area is also key in this situation. We need to determine the community leaders and give them the resources necessary to provide options for the youths on the streets who more often than not have nothing better to do.
A gang mentality fosters, and the kids then condition themselves to see their peer group as the authority, instead of the parents and the authorities. Giving licence to allow people to stroll around with guns isn't going to make our streets any better. We will just be more scared to walk the streets.
I wasn't asking for flak on the issue, but this is my country, and I have an idea for whats best for it. I dont want to shoot the people that are causing problems, because that wont address the underlying social issues.
If you guys want to carry guns, thats your legal entitlement.
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