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SHEFFIELD DRIVER JAILED FOR RAPE HE DIDN’T COMMIT: POLICE FAILURES HAVE RUINED MY LIFE
A Yorkshire taxi driver wrongly convicted of rape after vital evidence was not presented in court is telling his shocking story for the first time. Chris Burn of the Yorkshire Post speaks to him.
For Safraz, it was an unremarkable job on a busy but ordinary night of being a taxi driv- er in one of Yorkshire’s biggest cities, Sheffield. Little did the father- of-three know the late-night journey would soon plunge him into a nightmare that would end with him in prison, convicted of a rape he had never committed.
It took the tenacity of family and friends to eventually clear his name after he had spent 18 months in jail as they uncovered vital telephone records that proved he was on a conference call at the time of the alleged incident - evidence which South Yorkshire Police and the Crown Prosecution Service claimed did not exist and was never pre- sented to the jury in his original trial.
Almost four years after his conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal because of the new evidence and following the lead detective in the case admitting he had “made mistakes” in his investigation, Safraz has decided to come forward to tell his story to The Yorkshire Post.
CPS REVIEW
Safraz, not his real name, has decided to come forward due to the CPS recently announcing a review of all rape and serious sexual assault cases in light of the collapse of a number of high profile trials because of evidence disclosure failures.
He does not wish to disclose his identity as his original case never received any press coverage, and he does not want it to affect his family or his future job prospects. But he has shared court documents and tran- scripts with The Yorkshire Post relating to his case that raise serious questions about how the investigation was handled.
Safraz says the first he heard of the allega- tion was a couple of days after his shift on December 3, 2011 when he received a call
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One of the key pieces he told police back in the December 2011 interview was that dur- ing the time when the alleged incident happened, he had been on a lengthy three- way conference call with colleagues who would be able to confirm nothing had hap- pened. Safraz was not charged until July 2012 and the trial took place in January 2013, over a year after the alleged incident and subsequent police interview.
Safraz says his life has been ruined as a result of his wrongful conviction
from his taxi firm explaining the police wanted to speak to him. “I had a knock at my door and I was arrested on suspicion of rape. I was in absolute shock, I couldn’t even re-member which job they were talk- ing about where this was supposed to have happened until I got to the Sheffield Park- way and they gave me some detail about what the allegation was. It took me some time to remember who they were talking about as I had 25 to 30 jobs that night. It had just been an ordinary job, just business as usual.”
He learned the allegation was that while driving a passenger home, he had stopped in a lay-by, climbed between the front seats into the back and raped her before getting back in the front seat and driving away and dropping her off at her home. The entire incident was said to have occurred within two minutes and 50 sec- onds bet-ween the complainant ending one phone call with her boyfriend and then starting another one.
OVERWHELMING
Safraz says: “It was the first time I had ever been in a police station, I’m just an ordinary citizen. They did offer me a free solicitor but I refused to take one because I said I had nothing to hide. I answered every sin- gle question asked by the police, the interview lasted about two hours. I had faith the police would find the truth and I wanted to find them information to help them find the real perpetrator if there had been one.”
But a court transcript shows that the detec- tive constable who led the investigation told the trial that the phone records re-lat- ing to the potential conference were not available as the data gets overwritten after a year. He said he made enquiries about the matter a week before the trial was due to start.
The detective accepted under cross-
examination that if records had shown the conference call was taking place during the alleged incident, it may indicate that Safraz “possibly wasn’t responsible” for a rape. When asked whether he was content with the way he had investigated the matter, the officer replied: “Clearly now that I have made mistakes, I have to accept that.”
The other two men on the conference call were called as witnesses in Safraz’s defence but were cross-examined on the basis “they had simply concocted this evidence to pro- tect a friend”.
CONVICTION
After a ten-day trial, Safraz was convicted by a jury at Sheffield Crown Court of rape and subsequently sentenced to seven years in prison. He says: “You can’t understand how important this evidence was for the whole case - if I had been lying, it would have proved it. You can’t really blame the jury because if this evidence was in front of them, their verdict might have been differ- ent.
“But I had been let down by the police and let down by the justice system. I cried for half-an-hour, I couldn’t control my emo- tions. I knew I was going to prison for a very long time. If I had really done something, I would have accepted it on the first day, I wouldn’t have gone through the trial, I
APRIL 2018
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