Man jailed for seven years for raping woman in his flat

An Armenian man was jailed for seven years yesterday for raping a woman at his apartment in a case where the sentencing judge noted the gratuitous violence and threat of him raping her again.

Mr Justice Paul Carney imposed a nine-year sentence on Artek Khachatryan, 36, who had denied raping the victim at his flat in a Co Cork town on September 16, 2011, and suspended the last two years of the sentence.

In powerful victim impact evidence, she said her life has been destroyed by the attack: “I don’t enjoy being a woman anymore. It brought my life to a full stop. I was taking a lot of medication just to function on a day-to-day basis. I found that the medication had to be increased just to survive. My will to live had just gone. I didn’t want to face what I had been through.