3 men jailed for up to 45 years for abduction, sexual assault of women

AMMAN — The Criminal Court last week sentenced three men to increased prison terms ranging from 40 to 45 years in prison after convicting them of abducting and sexually assaulting women in the Kingdom in 2020.

Two of the three defendants received 45 years in prison, while the third was handed 40 years after being convicted of charges of sodomy, molestation, abduction, assault and theft of five women for over a year.

The defendants were also convicted of attempting to murder a man who was accompanying one of the victims at the time of her abduction.

The defendants were originally sentenced to 30 years each in prison, a senior judicial source told The Jordan Times on Sunday.

However, the senior judicial source added: “The tribunal decided to increase the punishments of the charges the defendants were convicted with because of the severity of their crimes”.

“The Criminal Court’s tribunal decided to hand the defendant a tough punishment as a form of deterrence because their actions constituted a grave danger to individuals and society,” the senior judicial source said.

Court papers said the three defendants, who were friends, decided to sexually assault women and stole a vehicle to accomplish “their evil acts”.

Wearing masks to cover their faces, the defendants would approach young men and women who would be sitting in their vehicles and “pose as police officers or security agents”, according to the 120-pages verdict.

“The defendants would ask the women to accompany them and would beat up the men who are with them in the vehicles,” the court said.

The three men would then drive to different governorates, park the stolen vehicle in secluded areas and “proceed to sexually assault the victims”, according to court transcripts.

The defendants would then give their victims a gallon of gasoline or water and ask them to “wash their private parts to erase any evidence”, the court continued.

After they were done, the court added, they would drop their victims on a main road and leave.

The three defendants were arrested following several complaints by the male victims who were accompanying the abducted female victims, the court documents stated.

The authorities were able to locate the three suspects and they were arrested, the court transcripts stated.

The three men confessed to assaulting seven female victims, but the prosecution was only able to forward five cases to the court, the senior judicial source noted.

“Only five women came forward to file complaints about the sexual assault incidents,” the judicial source said.

The court relied in its ruling on DNA evidencebelonging to some of the female victims found in the stolen vehicles, according to the judicial source.

Additional evidence included the identification of one of the perpetrators in a police lineup, whose mask fell during one of the assault incidents, as well as the defendants’ features that were provided by the victims, the judicial source added.

The Criminal Court’s tribunal was presided over by Judge AzaamNajdawi and included justices Mohammad Udwan and Mohammad Khalayleh.

The verdicts, which were issued last week, will automatically be reviewed by the Court of Cassation within the next 30 days.