Royal Mile van rapist is jailed

Published on Friday 11 April 2008 13:30

A BUILDING worker who was seen having sex with a drunken student in a parked van was jailed for three and a half years today.

Plasterer Rafal Cichy, 34, went to the cells still protesting his innocence, even though he was caught in the act by police.

They had been called to the van in the Royal Mile by onlookers from a backpackers' hostel.

Judge Lord Uist said: "Although the jury convicted you on the basis of strong evidence you have continued to deny your guilt and you have shown no concern for your victim."

During the trial, the jury heard how Cichy, of Wardlaw Street, Gorgie, was caught with his trousers round his ankles.

He said through an interpreter that he was too drunk to remember much but insisted the 25-year-old student had consented after having sex in the van with his friend Slawomir Nowosadzki, 32.

But a jury at the High Court in Edinburgh, by majority, found him guilty of rape by having sex with a woman who was unconscious and unable to give or withhold consent.

The student gave evidence from behind screens. She told how she drank three glasses of wine in a bar with colleagues that Saturday before going to another pub for a beer then starting to walk home.

"My next memory was sitting in the back of a police car and I felt like I was almost in and out of sleep," she said.

Asked how she responded to the allegation that two men had sex with her, she replied: "It is just disgusting. What gives anybody the right to do that?"

The trial heard how the van was parked near the Royal Mile Backpackers' Hostel in the early hours of Sunday, May 27, last year.

Night porter Hamish Kinsella, 24, told how he went outside to have a cigarette. He saw the couple kissing and cuddling in the front of the van, about ten metres away.

About 20 minutes later he, along with five others, were looking out of a window and the couple were still in the front of the van.

He told the court: "I saw a man and a lady having sex and later another man came up and knocked on the window and the first person jumped out and as he jumped out I saw the girl wasn't moving and the other man jumped in."

Mr Kinsella said that because the girl wasn't moving he thought police should be called.

Forensic scientist Howard Okely said a sample taken from the student after she was found by police showed a blood alcohol level almost twice the drink-drive limit.

Richard Goddard, defending, today said Cichy, a divorced father of two, had come to the UK to work and to better himself.

Although he respected the verdict of the jury he still maintained his innocence, perhaps because the law on rape was different in Poland, said the lawyer.

Nowosadzki of Caledonian Crescent, Dalry, was cleared of rape by the same jury.