Afghan student held on rape charge in Hyderabad

An Afghan student pursuing his engineering course was arrested on charges of raping a woman at his rented apartment here at Amberpet, the police said on Friday.

The arrested man, identified as Nayel Yosufi, is a second-year student of Civil Engineering course in the College of Engineering on the Osmania University campus. He reportedly got introduced to the victim who is a post graduate student in a private college here. The woman lives in a rented house in Tarnaka.

Yosufi, according to police, had been requesting her to be his girlfriend for the past one month though she made it clear to him that she was not interested in him, said OU Inspector P. Ashok. He had also threatened to end his life if she did not pay heed to his request. On Wednesday night, he went to her house and began discussing the issue. Later, the Afghan reportedly suggested that she could come over to his house to talk about it.

“I was worried that he would carry out his threat of ending his life if I turned down his request of going to his room and hence obliged,” the police quoted her as saying.

“When she wanted to return home as it was late in the night, the accused person asked her to stay back in his room assuring that he would drop her safely the next morning,” the Inspector said. However, he allegedly violated her in the night after threatening to strangle her to death. She returned to her room on Thursday morning. After speaking with her friends about the sexual assault, she approached the OU police who picked up Yosufi.

“He admitted to the crime. The victim was sent for medical examination,” the police said. The victim alleged that the engineering student had taken her semi-nude pictures with a camera before the sexual assault. However, the police said that they could not find any camera in his house during the search.

A series of photographs of the victim and the accused taken earlier were found in a laptop, which was seized.

Investigators also recorded statements of the victim’s friends with whom she spoke after the sexual assault.