Besufikad Yebeltal Haile, 24, Bedhane Tarika Bekele, 28 and Sadam Hussein Issak, 24 on trial for alleged nightclub rape of teen girl
She was ‘18, drunk, alone and vulnerable’. These three men are now on trial for allegedly taking turns raping her and filming it on their phone.
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An 18-year-old girl who was so intoxicated she’d been kicked out of a city nightclub was indecently assaulted in the back of a taxi by two men she did not know, before they took her to a strange house, raped her with a third man and filmed the whole ordeal, a court has heard.
On the first day of their rape trial on Thursday, Besufikad Yebeltal Haile, 24 from Parafield Gardens, Bedhane Tarika Bekele, 28 of Croydon Park and Sadam Hussein Issak, 24 from Gilberton, sat silently in the South Australian District Court listening as prosecutor Chris Allen told a jury the men had taken advantage of a young, drunk woman in June 2023.
The trio have been charged with and pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of rape after the alleged victim alerted police to the indecent the day after she said it happened.
Mr Issak and Mr Bekele have been further charged with multiple counts of aggravated indecent assault.
In his opening address, Mr Allen told the jury the teen, who cannot be identified, had arrived at Zhivago nightclub on Currie St in the CBD at about 10pm on the evening of June 17, 2023.
He said she had stayed in the club with a friend until she was kicked out just after 2am for being too intoxicated.
In the following hour, she met the three men – Mr Haile, Mr Bekele and Mr Issak.
“At about 3.41am, they get into a taxi on Currie St. Mr Haile sits in the front seat, Mr Issak in the rear seat behind the driver, and Mr Bekele sits in the rear passenger seat. (The victim) is seated in the middle,” Mr Allen said.
He said CCTV footage taken from a camera inside the taxi shows the victim “extremely intoxicated”, but also showed Mr Bekele and Mr Issak touching up the woman’s dress, and forcing her head down to perform sexual acts on them.
“We suggest that it looks like she’s having trouble breathing. We suggest you can hear her say ‘stop, stop, stop, let me breathe.’”
After arriving at an address in West Croydon, the men are alleged to have each engaged in sexual intercourse with the woman, with some of the acts filmed on a mobile phone.
Mr Allen said she appeared to be crying at some stage during the nearly hour-long altercation, with one of the males seen later in the footage holding condoms.
“We suggest that Mr Haile puts his middle finger up to the camera and to the phone he says ‘we wanted this girl, yeah’.”
Defence lawyers Alex Rice, for Mr Haile, and Matt Christey, for Mr Bekele, told the jury the question would not be whether their clients had engaged in sexual intercourse, it was whether they had done so with consent.
The trial continues.
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Originally published as Besufikad Yebeltal Haile, 24, Bedhane Tarika Bekele, 28 and Sadam Hussein Issak, 24 on trial for alleged nightclub rape of teen girl
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