Epress.am News from Armenia
Four citizens of Russia (two of Armenian descent) cheered a gang rape like “professional footballers celebrating the scoring of a goal,” a judge said yesterday as he jailed them for a total of 36 years, reports the Daily Mail.
Oleg Ivanov and Gregory Andreev Melnikov, both 23, Norayr Davtyan (pictured, main), 22, and Armen Simonyan (pictured, below), 19, filmed the sickening attack on an 18-year-old Malaysian fellow student at their £30,000 a year boarding school using an iPhone.
Jurors unanimously convicted the “minigarchs” of rape after viewing the video, during which one of them labelled the victim a ‘machine for ****ing’, while another had to ask her name.
Ringleader Davtyan, who maintained in the witness box that the 18-year-old Malaysian teen was a “slut,” was jailed for 10 years; Melnikov for nine years and Ivanov and Simonyan for eight years apiece at Woolwich Crown Court this afternoon.
In the course of the “disgusting” attack they egged each other on by saying: “You’re not going to marry her.”
They later showed the iPhone footage of their victim’s ordeal to friends at their exclusive college in south London.
Judge Peter Murphy said: “The iPhone footage shows what can only be described as a callous disregard for the victim as a human being and indeed as anything other than an object of their own pleasure.
“Although there was no pre-existing plan, once the sequence of events started, they were encouraging each other to do more and more and were clearly seen on the iPhone celebrating their triumph almost in the manner of professional footballers celebrating the scoring of a goal.
“They also boasted that they would show the footage to anyone in Moscow.
“[The victim] in my judgment certainly is heard to utter the word ‘no’ on a number of occasions. Whatever the case of her condition, it is clear, as I think it must have been to the defendants, that she was in no position to decide whether to consent or not to consent, or to resist what was going on.
“No one who has seen that footage can leave this trial without feeling complete disgust towards it.”
On the night of Jan. 21 this year, the college put on a disco for its students, while Davtyan also held an impromptu party in his room.
The victim went to the room between 7pm and 8pm and downed a shot of whiskey before going back to the main building.
She thought her drink had been spiked and felt dizzy.
CCTV cameras captured her stumbling though the main entrance before later filming her in an outdoor smoking area talking to Ivanov and Melnikov.
She was later seen walking away from the smoking area with Melnikov when she was taken to the party in Davtyan’s room.
Once there she was seen to vomit and lie down on the floor, and as the party wound down she was eventually left alone with the four men.
Video footage recovered from Davtyan’s iPhone taken between 12.38am and 3.10am then showed all four men raping the girl.
“At one point Mr. Ivanov said he felt pity for her, but this was only after he and the others had sex with her,” prosecutor Peter Clement said.
“He was talked out of that attitude by Mr. Davtyan who described [the girl] as just a whore and a machine for f******’.”
The footage also showed that the rapists took regular breaks to go outside for cigarettes.
Ivanov, Melnikov, Davtyan, Simonyan, all of Deptford, South-East London, all denied two counts of rape.
In their evidence, they tried to claim that the sex had been consensual.
The jury of seven men and four women unanimously convicted Davtyan of two counts of rape.
They convicted Melnikov of one count of rape but found him not guilty of the other, instead finding him guilty of an alternative charge of attempted rape.
Ivanov and Simonyan were both convicted of one rape count and acquitted of the second.