Ingrained fear of authority and Somali attitudes towards adultery may have prompted an HIV positive man to lie to police during a rape investigation, a jury was told today.
Somali refugee Abdirazak Yussuf Mussa is being retried in the Wellington District Court on two counts of rape and one of abduction with intent to sexually violate.
He has denied all charges relating to the incident, which allegedly happened after he picked up an 18-year-old woman and drove her to his house in September 2006.
The jury yesterday saw a police video evidence of Mussa, then 55, change his story repeatedly in the evidential interview at the Wellington Central police station.
Defence counsel Donald Stevens, QC, said the woman had willingly gone with Mussa to his house and willingly had sex with him.
She did not take the opportunity to escape when Mussa stopped his taxi at a supermarket, went inside and left her alone for five minutes, despite being minutes' walk from her house, Dr Stevens said.
Nor did she take the chance to escape when she followed him into his house. She did not use the phone in the office, nor look for an exit in the room where she was allegedly raped.
"She did not do any of these things because she was quite happy to be there. She went along to continue drinking," Dr Stevens said.
Abdirazak Abdiramin, a Hamilton-based community advisor on Somali and Islamic affairs, took the witness box to tell the court of the community's ingrained fear of authority.
After Siad Barre seized power in 1969, the population grew to fear authorities due to frequent summary executions, imprisonment without reason and torture, he said.
The situation became much worse from 1991 with the country's civil war, when the state failed completely, he said.
Mr Abdiramin also spoke of the social punishment meted out by the New Zealand Islamic community to adulterers - ostracising and humiliating not only the individuals involved in the relationship, but their family and even their entire tribe.
In Somalia, adulterers were stoned to death if married. If unmarried, they were lashed 100 times, Mr Abdiramin said.
It was one of the three worst sins of Islam, he said.
Detective Constable Trevor Collett, who investigated the case, told the court earlier Telecom had no record of text messages sent between the mobile telephones of the complainant and her friends in the period after the alleged rape.
Nor had the complainant or her friends kept the messages, when asked for them by the police.
The prosecution and defence give their summaries tomorrow.
