Seven years for rapist Pc

A police officer who raped a woman after showing her his warrant card and assuring her "you'll be safe with me", was jailed for seven years today.

Pc Asif Habib lured her back to his room in a police section house after she had become separated from her friend at a West End nightclub.

The screams of the 23-year-old victim were so loud they were heard by another officer in the next room in the accommodation block at Marble Arch.

It took the jury of seven women and five men just 40 minutes to convict Habib, 28, of rape and false imprisonment.

As the verdict was returned after a two-day trial at Southwark Crown Court, Habib wept with his head in his hands.

Jailing him, Judge James Wadsworth said: "You were a member of an honest and trusted profession on which we all rely, but you let that profession down badly and you let the public down badly.

"It is not that for which I sentence you, but what you did on that night when you created a feeling of trust in a woman whom you knew to be the worse for drink and, I suspect, whom you also knew to be very naive and unused to the hard ways of London.

"You, by showing you were a policeman with access to police accommodation, led her to believe she was going somewhere where she would be safe.

"You abused that by raping her in a particularly degrading fashion. Since then she has lived through a year of hell and that is something I also have to take into account."

The victim, who had just started a new job in London, was celebrating with colleagues in July last year. A visit to a pub, where she was said to have "drunk more than her fair share", was followed by a visit to Hombres nightclub in Oxford Street where she was approached by Habib.

He asked her for a dance but she agreed only if he managed to beat her at pool. He duly won the game and as they danced he demanded a kiss, tilting his head so that her intended peck on the cheek landed on his lips.

Habib then told her he was a policeman and suggested after showing his warrant card that she would be safe if she returned with him to the section house. She realised that her friends had now disappeared so agreed to leave with him, walking arminarm up Oxford Street.

But back at his room he ignored her pleas and raped her, despite her putting up "quite a struggle".

He initially refused to let her have her clothes back, then took a ring from her finger and put it on his own in an attempt to prove that they had formed a solid relationship, the court heard.

She was finally allowed her clothes and phoned the police as soon as she arrived home.

When arrested, Habib presented a prepared statement to detectives, insisting that everything had occurred "entirely with her consent". However Pc Richard Ingman, lodging in the room opposite Habib, told the court that he heard a female voice " screeching and screaming".

The victim has been so traumatised by the ordeal that she has given up her career in London and gone back to live with her family in Reading, the court was told.

Detective Chief Inspector Chris Smith, of the Metropolitan Police's Directorate of Professional Standards, said after the case: "The behaviour of Habib in this case is completely unacceptable as today's verdict has shown. He abused his position as a police officer to gain the trust of a woman who was in a very vulnerable position.

"No police officer is above the law and all will be held accountable for their actions."

Habib, who was based at Notting Hill, was suspended from duty on 19 July, 2001 after carrying out the attack at the Robert Mark section house, Marble Arch.