A taxi driver who raped a male passenger after picking him up from a Leeds gay pub has been jailed.
44-year-old father-of-five Mohammed Ilyas picked up the man, who is in his fifties, and then drove him to a remote location.
The man had been drinking during a night out with his friends who eventually put him in Ilyas’s taxi thinking he would be safe.
Leeds Crown Court heard instead of taking the man home, Ilyas took him to a remote farm track where he orally raped him.
Ilyas denied rape but was convicted by a jury at Leeds Crown Court last month.
The victim’s personal statement was read out in court by prosecutor Matthew Bean, saying the whole experience had been a “nightmare” and that “because of what the taxi driver did to me that night I have at many points been suicidal.”
He added: “I never go to town alone anymore and will never get a taxi alone again. I will never forget this. I don’t know when or if I will ever get over it.”
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Mitigating, Daniel Calder, said his client had no previous conviction.
Mr Calder said: “This was, and I hope the court will accept this, an isolated incident entirely out of character.”
Jailing Ilyas for 12-years, Judge Tom Bayliss QC said : “I’m quite sure that you deliberately parked your taxi outside what you knew was a gay pub, thus deliberately engineering a situation where you found yourself alone in your taxi with a passenger who was incapacitated by drink.
“That passenger had come from a pub, you then committed rape on him, a homosexual rape upon a man who you had seen coming from a gay pub.
“I’m quite sure that you targeted (the victim). It may not have been long in the planning, but once you saw, you him stopped your taxi and you targeted him.”
Judge Bayliss jailed Ilyas for 12 years and made a sexual harm prevention order banning him from contacting his victim and from working as a taxi driver.
