‘I feel scared all the time since he did that to me’

Years of work building up the independence of a young woman with Down syndrome were instantly destroyed when she was raped by Faisal Ellahi, a court has heard.

At a sentencing hearing yesterday the victim’s mother said the family and support services had brought the woman, who is in her 20s, to the stage where she had a job, could travel on her own and could run errands for her mother.

“All that work was wiped out by such depravity,” she told the Central Criminal Court as her daughter watched via video-link from a room elsewhere in the Criminal Courts of Justice.