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Prosecutor: Alleged rapist threatened to kill student
By David Weber
A prosecutor opened a Suffolk Superior court trial yesterday by accusing a 33-year-old South End man of viciously threatening and raping a Boston University at a Fenway dormitory 16 months ago.
"Don't make a sound. I'll kill you. I'll kill anybody. I don't care," Abdelmajid Akouk said to the 18-year-old woman while holding a knife to her chest, according to Assistant District Attorney Edmond Zabin.
The prosecutor, in his opening statement to the jury, said police have DNA evidence of Akouk's semen on the girl's clothing.
Zabin also said Akouk's fingerprints were lifted from a shower stall where he lay in wait for the girl about 4:30 a.m. on Sept. 12, 1999, inside Loretto Hall on the Emmanuel College campus.
Akouk was arrested within minutes of leaving the dorm, which was being rented as overflow housing by Boston University.
Zabin said BU police officers caught Akouk climbing over an iron fence along Brookline Avenue. They said he was carrying a knife and told the officers he was "just out for a walk."
Just prior to raping the 18-year-old girl, Zabin said, Akouk had jiggled the knob on a dorm room door down the hall from the victim's room.
About two hours earlier, he allegedly groped one of three female Emmanuel students walking home from a nearby Lansdowne Street nightclub.
Zabin said Akouk's "lazy" right eye, over which his eyelid droops, was a key identifying characteristic cited by the woman whose breast was groped.
Defense attorney Mary Ames fired back in her opening to the jury, saying, "Now let me tell you the rest of the story."
Ames said the alleged victim had been drinking heavily and that she consented to sex with Akouk.
The defense attorney also said that six minutes passed between the time the rape was first reported to police and the time the BU officers arrived on the scene to arrest Akouk. But it would take only a matter of seconds for a fleeing man to leave the dorm and reach the iron fence where the officers grabbed Akouk.
Prosecutors allege, however, that after an initial sexual assault in a dorm rest-room shower stall, Akouk forced the woman into her dorm room out of fear of being caught.
But Ames said the woman's roommate was asleep in her bed when the sex resumed on the floor with the lights on.
Ames said the roommate woke up and saw the alleged victim's legs wrapped around Akouk's legs.
The roommate, who barely knew the alleged victim at the start of the freshman year, pulled her pillow and blanket over her head and let the act continue, according to Ames.
She also charged that the alleged victim has given police varying accounts of what happened that night.
The trial continues today.
--Reprinted with permission of the Boston Herald.
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