A “violent predatory rapist” who came to the United Kingdom from Ethiopia as a refugee has been convicted for roaming the country by train assaulting women.
Temesgen Desta, 32, throttled a 54-year-old woman on a beach in Crosby, Merseyside and attempted to rape her, then took a train to Birmingham and broke into a businesswoman’s city apartment just hours later, according to a report in the left-wing Mirror.
As in his Crosby attack, Destat seized the Birmingham woman by the throat, forcing her into a bedroom and threatening that he had a knife, tying her up with a bathrobe cord and a telephone cable after he had carried out his attack and trapping her inside the room with a chair.
It took her almost an hour to free herself and seek help from a concierge, with her hands still tied.
Incredibly, the migrant had been imprisoned for hurling racist abuse at security staff while carrying a knife just last year, but the authorities failed to detain and deport him after his brief stint in custody.
“You are a violent predatory rapist,” said sentencing judge Judge Melbourne Inman, QC.
“These were determined attacks with extreme violence on two women in two different parts of the country within a matter of hours,” he recounted.
“You have no remorse, you have no insight into your offending. The nature of the attacks are such that a dangerous finding is inevitable.
“There is no alternative sentence that would provide protection to the public and therefore this court must impose a sentence of life imprisonment.”
“Life” sentences in the United Kingdom are somewhat disingenuously titled, however, as they almost never entail a so-called “whole life order”, i.e. life in custody.
Instead, they typically involve serving a relatively short minimum term behind bars, followed by a parole hearing and release back onto the streets with the mere possibility of being recalled to prison if certain terms and conditions are broken.
This is often too late to save victims from the supposed “lifers” reoffending — for example, at least 51 people were killed by criminals previously convicted of homicide between 2009 and 2017.
In Desta’s case, his minimum term in custody has been set at ten years — almost seven decades short of average male life expectancy in the country — and it is not even clear that he will finally be deported on release, with Judge Inman saying his “status is not a matter to me.”