Rapists were caught by chance say police

TWO Polish cousins who subjected a young woman to an eight-hour rape ordeal were caught by chance in a supermarket car park – only 200 metres from the crime scene.

Officers recognised Michal Marchlewski and Tomasz Kryczyk from the victim's detailed descriptions as they stood next to the Somerfield store on Dalry Road.

The pair had repeatedly raped the 24-year-old Australian beautician in a makeshift drinking den hidden in bushes behind the Lidl store located on the same street.

Police were combing the area and interviewing potential witnesses 14 hours after the woman was released by her captors when the men were spotted. They had remained in the area despite a police manhunt.

Yesterday, Marchlewski was branded a "psychopath" at the High Court in Edinburgh, and given a life sentence with an order to serve at least ten years.

If he is freed, the judge said that Home Office officials should consider deporting Marchlewski, 21, back to Poland.

Kryczyk, 26, had been expected to admit rape and attempted murder but hanged himself in his prison cell last year.

The court heard that Marchlewski told his accomplice the day after the attack on 16 February last year, "We should have killed her by strangling her and then nobody would've known about it".

Today, Detective Chief Inspector John McKenzie paid tribute to the victim's courage.

He said: "The victim showed great courage and deserves the community's gratitude for her bravery. She made sure two men who posed a danger to the public were arrested in only 14 hours.

"The threat to kill her was obviously made and I don't anticipate that the next stage of carrying out that threat was beyond them."

DCI McKenzie said both men had been living in homes in the Capital, and had constructed the makeshift shelter only days before the attack as a "drinking den".

The victim was blasted in the face with pepper spray as she walked home from work in broad daylight through a pedestrian underpass near the city's Fountainpark leisure centre.

She was raped eight times by Marchlewski and his cousin before being released.

Marchlewski, whose mother and father both live in Edinburgh, had a history of violence and background reports prepared for yesterday's hearing concluded that he was a danger to the public.

The court heard that Marchlewski had shown "visible enjoyment" while slaughtering a pig during a previous job and terrorised other members of the Polish community in the Capital.

Experts testified that he would be capable of sadistically motivated violence in the future and showed a "psychopathic personality disorder".

Lord Bracadale told Marchlewski: "You have pleaded guilty to a serious offence, the gravity of which is so extreme as to be difficult to register. It is difficult to conceive of a worse ordeal for a woman. The experience is bound to have had a profound effect on her and her family."

The victim's father was in court for yesterday's sentencing while his daughter and her husband remained at home in Australia.