Three-time rapist has sentence changed

The Court of Criminal Appeal today varied prison sentences imposed last year by Mr Justice Paul Carney on a serial rapist who raped three woman in vicious attacks in Dublin.

Mr Justice Carney sentenced Salman Aslam Dar (aged 25), a computer science student from Lahore, Pakistan to three consecutive prison sentences of seven years with the final two years suspended after he pleaded guilty last year to the sex attacks between February and June 2004 in Dublin city.

But today, following an application by the Director of Public Prosecutions, the three judges at the Court of Criminal Appeal sentenced Dar to 10 years imprisonment for the first attack, to 12 years for the second attack and to 15 years imprisonment fore the third rape, and ordered all sentences to run concurrently from June 8, 2004.

Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns, presiding, said that taken individually the in-effect sentence of five years for each offences was inadequate. He said the court would have been tempted to increase the sentences but for the fact that Dar's counsel Mr Felix Mc Enroy SC had given an unqualified undertaking that his client would leave the jurisdiction and return to Pakistan when his term of imprisonment is over.

The judge said that that it was necessary to give recognition to the horrific nature of the assaults ands to reflect the court's abhorrence and the abhorrence of all members of society at the offences.

"All three of these victims were horrifically damaged as a result of these vicious assaults of the worst kind imaginable," the judge said.

The judge outlined the circumstances of the three attacks. Dar attacked three women - a 23-year-old Mexican woman, a 23-year-old Polish woman and a 29-year-old Irish woman - who were all attacked as they walked home by themselves in the early hours.

Dar had an address at Abbey View, Ballyhaunis, Co Mayo at the time of the assaults.