A father-of-two found guilty of raping a woman in a brutal car ordeal was jailed for seven and a half years.

Mohammed Khan was found guilty at Bradford Crown Court of raping the 27-year-old woman in a pub car park in July 1996.

Passing sentence, Judge Alistair McCallum described how the woman had been held down, punched in the face, and attacked in circumstances which could only be described as "brutal".

He also told Khan that if it was not for the interference of a scientist, his crime "probably would have gone unpunished" after it was revealed that a police computer database matched Khan's DNA to a sample recovered at the time of the incident.

The court heard during the trial that after his arrest in April last year Khan said he was not responsible for the attack on the married woman. But he did not give an explanation for the DNA link.

Khan, 29, of Harlow Road, Lidget Green, denied raping the woman after she had accepted a lift in a car from a man claiming to be a taxi driver on the night of the attack in July 1996.

The woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, said she had gone out with her sister-in-law but lost her in a Halifax nightclub. She decided to see friends at the Sugar Cane nightclub in Bradford but was unable to find any of them and sat down on her own to have a drink.

The woman added that three Asian men sat at her table and one offered to buy her a drink, but she declined.

The court was told that she was about to go home when one of the men told her he was a taxi driver and she was persuaded to let him take her home after dropping his friends off.

She tearfully described how, when she got into the car, another man also joined them and she found herself stuck between two men on the back seat. The car later pulled up in a pub car park before the man in the front passenger seat punched her twice in the face.

The woman claimed that the two men sitting next to her grabbed her legs and one of them put his arm across her throat so she could hardly breathe. She alleged the front-seat passenger climbed between the seats and began ripping her tights off.

Khan repeatedly denied any involvement in the rape but said he did have sex with the woman.

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