A man who strangled, raped and threatened to kill a teenager hours after the two connected on a flatsharing app has been jailed for 12 years.
Mirza Begg showed the 18-year-old woman a ‘sinister-looking’ collection of weapons, including knives, a sword and bullets before the assault at his home in Birmingham.
Thirty-four-year-old Begg was sentenced at Birmingham Crown Court on Friday following a conviction in September.
A jury found him guilty of two charges of assault by penetration, intentional strangulation, making threats with a bladed weapon, and assault.
The court heard that Begg lured the young woman to his flat with the promise of allowing her to live there.
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At the sentencing, prosecutor Joshua Purser told Birmingham Crown Court that the victim, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was deliberately put in fear and subdued by being shown the weapons before she was attacked.
She was then held against her will and ‘had to be rescued’ by police after messaging a friend to say she had been assaulted.
The ‘extremely vulnerable’ woman contacted Begg through the Roomies app and he later picked her up in a car he had borrowed from a relative, the trial heard.
Begg, who has previous convictions for battery and theft, appeared at his sentencing hearing via a prison videolink, having refused to help probation staff prepare a pre-sentence report.
Mr Purser told the court: ‘We submit that the use of the app was demonstrative of his planning – a deliberate trap by which he could conjure up a pretence to bring a female into his flat with no witnesses.
‘There was not a single moment of consensual sexual activity despite what he said at trial.’
As he sentenced Begg, Judge Simon Drew KC described the offences as ‘very serious’.
Begg, who told the woman he was recently divorced and looking for someone to share his home, had intended to entice the woman to live at his flat, the judge said.
When the woman resisted, the court heard, Begg had sworn at her, told her to ‘deal with it’ and then sexually assaulted her despite repeated attempts to fight him off.
He also slapped the victim and used a knife to threaten her.
Eventually Begg fell asleep, the police were contacted and he was arrested, the judge said.
‘This was an extremely serious offence in which you had deliberately planned to lure the victim to your home and she was clearly someone who was young – almost half your age – and you targeted her,’ Judge Drew told Begg
Begg, who will be on the sex offenders register for life, was told he will have to serve two-thirds of his sentence in custody before being released on licence.
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