A 38-year-old Meppeler faces a prison sentence of forty months for a rape in November 2005. Twelve months of this are conditional. The public prosecutor believes that the suspect is also guilty of two assaults in September 2004 in Havelte and July 2011 in Meppel.
The thirties came into the picture at the beginning of 2022 after a DNA match. The man gave up cell material for a fireworks offense that matched the material in the Dutch DNA database. That came from a semen trail left in 2005 on the rainwear of a woman who reported rape.
The victim was riding her bicycle to work early that morning when she was hit by a man on a scooter. She was roughly groped and sexually assaulted. The woman was terrified because the man threatened to knock her down several times. After the abuse, he apologized: “This should never have happened,” he said and drove off.
The woman filed a report and said the man was riding a red scooter. The unknown DNA was stored in the database. The man told the judge on Tuesday that he had indeed had sex with the woman on the bicycle. But that was with her permission, the man said. The prosecutor does not believe this. “The woman drove to work in her rainwear, you don’t expect something like that.”
The woman appeared at the court hearing in Assen and used her right to speak. “Why have you been silent for so long. How did you live with this,” she said. The rape weighed heavily on her life, she said, and she was eventually treated for it. After the match, the police investigated similar cases that had not yet been solved.
In 2004, a report was received about an assault in Havelte. A young girl on a bicycle was overtaken by a man on a burgundy scooter. The man groped her roughly and tried to trap her. She didn’t let this happen. She remembered the license plate, which was in the name of the suspect at that time.
The woman did not want to file a report and the license plate was not checked. Until the investigation after the match in 2022. The license plate was in 2004 in the name of the suspect. The man vehemently denies the assault. “I regularly lent the scooter to friends,” he said. The public prosecutor called it striking that the scooter rider proceeded in the same way in both cases.
The public prosecutor also attributed an assault on a woman in Meppel in 2011 to the Meppeler. The declarant was the suspect’s downstairs neighbor at the time. She was assaulted in the shed when she wanted to put her bicycle away. She called her mother immediately after the incident, who said that her daughter was very upset. This substantiates the woman’s complaint, the prosecutor said.
This report was not taken up further at the time due to a lack of evidence. But reopened after the match. De Meppeler also denies this accusation with great certainty. The man has a criminal record, but has not previously been convicted of a sex offense. He has been psychologically examined and is struggling with a personality disorder. He is open to treatment, he told the judge.
The public prosecutor finds the claims for damages of a total of 10,000 euros allowable. He demanded an extra long probationary period of five years, because the risk of recurrence is estimated to be high. The court will rule in two weeks.