Jurors watched a videotaped police interview of a HIV-positive taxi driver accused of raping his 18-year-old female passenger in Wellington District Court today.
Abdiraazak Yussuf Mussa, then 55, changed his story repeatedly in the evidential interview at the Wellington Central police station.
Mussa is being retried on two counts of rape and one of abduction with intent to sexually violate. He has denied all charges.
He is accused of picking up the woman, whose name is suppressed, on Wellington's Courtenay Place around 5.30am in September 2006, then taking her to his house and raping her.
In the interview, Mussa was asked about his drinking habits, whether he picked up any young women on the morning of the alleged rape and whether he had ever brought anyone back to his Miramar house.
Before screening the video, the court heard from one of the complainant's close friends.
She said her friend had told her she had been taken by a taxi driver. The pair had driven past the house the complainant alleged she was taken to.
The complainant told the friend "he didn't let her go. That he had taken her against her will. She said she was too scared to go to sleep and there was a deadlock on the door".
The complainant's mother - who called police about the rape - described her daughter distancing herself from her friends, and lying about work attendance around the time of the incident.
Defence lawyer, Donald Stevens, QC, asked the complainant's mother about her daughter's habit of staying out all night.
"She did it from time to time. She would stop on the way home for breakfast with her friends," the woman said.
Wellington CIB Detective Sergeant Zane Smith told the court police searched the Miramar property and found four unopened condoms and some bedding, but no changes of clothes or toiletries.
They also searched a room Mussa used as an office, from which he ran his taxi company.
Aside from the slide-bolt on his office door, Mr Smith said he did not see any other significant locks in the Miramar house - those that were there seemed designed to keep people out, not people in.
Later, when Mussa was charged he told police he had carried the HIV virus "for about 10 years", Mr Smith said.
The jury also read a statement from a widowed friend of Mussa, who said the accused had helped her and her sons get established in New Zealand after arriving from Somalia.
He drove them around, gave them goods and money and found them a place to stay.
