Bilal Haider 28

Description

A takeaway and supermarket worker who sexually attacked a Little Red Riding Hood-costumed student on Cowley Road was caught in part from the DNA he left on her red cape.

Bilal Haider, 27, who worked shifts at the takeaway and Tesco while he studied for a masters degree in Oxford, was caught on CCTV running after the young woman as they both headed east towards Cowley.

The victim was on her way home, having spent the night at the Fishies club night at the O2 Academy in early November 2021.

Jurors at Oxford Crown Court this week heard she was alone, had lent her phone to a friend then lost sight of her, and although she had been drinking was not drunk.

As she walked down the Cowley Road, Lonsdale-tracksuited Haider – who it later emerged had pictures on his phone of random young women - could be seen jogging to catch up with her.

Opening the case earlier this week, prosecutor Henry James said the lone woman heard footsteps behind her then a man’s voice asking whether he could kiss her.

“She said she was fine and said he could not,” Mr James said.

Undeterred, the man offered her money.

He went on to try and kiss her, groped at her body and pushed his hand beneath her dress.

The woman was ‘terrified’, the jury was told.

She ran to a university halls on nearby Glanville Road, where she knew a security guard would be on duty, and knocked at the window to raise the alarm.

The guard made sure she was okay and, later, the woman was able to get back home, the court heard. 

She told friends about what had happened to her.

But it was not until police officers searching for a missing child found her distressed on a bridge in Oxford that she told detectives what had happened to her.

Using CCTV, the detectives were able to trace Haider’s route backwards down Cowley Road to the takeaway where he worked.

When they visited the eatery they found he was working behind the counter, the court heard.

DNA tests on woman’s Little Red Riding Hood cape showed the presence of the defendant’s saliva on the item of clothing.

From the witness box this week, he flatly denied sexually assaulting the woman.

Despite not saying so in a legal document prepared ahead of the trial and setting out his defence, he claimed to have seen the woman fall to the ground and had helped her to the feet and across the road.

On Friday, jurors returned unanimous guilty verdicts after more than six and a half hours of deliberations to charges of sexual assault.

They returned to court later in the afternoon, having found Haider guilty by a majority of 10 to two of sexually assaulting the victim by penetration.

Judge Michael Gledhill KC told the defendant: “You have been convicted on very clear evidence, in my judgment, of these three serious sexual offences.”

Haider, of Hawkins Street, Oxford, was jailed for four and a half years and will remain on the sex offender register for life.