Thread: Two are charged with kidnapping woman at bar, assaulting her at apartment -

Two are charged with kidnapping woman at bar, assaulting her at apartment

The woman told police she got separated from her boyfriend before she was drugged and kidnapped.

Video at the Page Link:

by Gene Hartley and Jerry Jacob, KY3 News
news@ky3.com 11:17 p.m. CDT, June 3, 2013

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. -- Two college students are charged with kidnapping a woman from a bar, carrying her nearly unconscious into an apartment, and sexually assaulting her. City police say a tip from a taxi driver led them to the apartment, where they interrupted the assault.

Rayan Alqabbaa, 21, and Ahmed Alanazi, 27, are each charged with forcible sodomy and kidnapping. Prosecutors asked for $1 million bonds on each of them because they're from Saudi Arabia and might be flight risks. If they're convicted, they could get life (30-year) prison sentences. Police say they're students at Missouri State University.

The probable cause statement against the men says police got a call about 2:50 a.m. Saturday from a taxi driver after he took two men and a woman "in and out of consciousness" to an apartment at 701 Elm St., where both men rent separate apartments. When police arrived, they said they heard a woman moaning inside the apartments of one of the men.

When police went inside they found Alanazi and Alqabbaa. They asked if a woman was in the apartment, and Alanazi pointed them to a locked bedroom door, according to the probable cause statement. Police found a woman crying, asking for help, and lying partially unclothed on a bed in a fetal position with vomit on the bed. She told police she didn't know the two men in the apartment, and told police that her attackers were "bad" men.

Police looked at surveillance video at the apartment and saw one of the men carry the unconscious woman into the apartment over his shoulder. They found bruses, cuts and abrasions on the woman's hands, arms and chin.

After the woman was treated at a hospital, police spoke to her by telephone, according to the probable cause statement. The woman said she went into Zan Nightclub on Patton Avenue while her boyfriend was parking the car.

"When she entered, the bartender gave her two drinks and told her they were on the house," the probable cause statement says. "She consumed the drinks and does not remember much after that. She said she remembered a group of men surrounding her. They grabbed her by the arms and were pulling her hair. She said she did not know them. She does not remember how she got out of the bar and into the apartment."

The woman told police that the men held her down when she tried to leave the apartment.

Copyright © 2013, KY3-TV

http://www.ky3.com/news/ky3-2-are-ch...,6085889.story

It sounds as though Missouri State has turned itself into a foreign student mill and the community has to deal with the results. One of these "students" was 27 years old.

Police may talk to new foreign students

MSU aims to prevent incidents like the one in which 2 are charged

Jun. 4, 2013 9:49 PM |

Police presentations might be included at Missouri State University for future orientations for international students. / News-Leader file photo

Written by
Steve Pokin

Missouri State University might include a police presentation in future orientations for international students in the wake of sexual assault charges filed against two students from Saudi Arabia over the weekend.

“We are looking at whether there is something we can be doing to help prevent these instances,” said Stephen Robinette, MSU’s associate vice president of the school’s international program.

Currently, Robinette said, orientation is done exclusively by MSU staff. That will change, he said, with the addition of community members.

“It could include local police and local authorities and other areas,” Robinette said. He declined to give examples of what the other areas of community involvement might be.

Robinette said he met with other MSU staff members Monday to review how to improve orientation for MSU’s growing number of foreign students. In the fall, there were 1,426 foreign students at MSU, including 805 (56.4 percent) from China and 244 (17.1 percent) from Saudi Arabia. The third highest group, from South Korea, was 56 students (3.9 percent.)

“We are going to take some positive steps to try and do a better job,” he said.
Ahmed Ayed A. Alanazi, 27, and Rayan Mohammed A. Alqabbaa, 21, are being held on $1 million bond each in the Greene County Jail, accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman early Saturday morning. The two men had been enrolled in MSU’s English Language Institute in the spring semester.

In March, a Saudi Arabian man studying at MSU was charged with first-degree domestic assault, armed criminal action, second-degree domestic assault and felonious restraint.

Fahad Maashi, 20, is accused of choking a woman and trying to kill her.
He remains in the county jail on a bond of $500,000.

In January, Ahmed Salman Almahuzi, 26, a student from Saudi Arabia studying business at MSU, was sentenced to 120 days in jail and four years probation after killing a pedestrian, William McCreary, who was 24.

Almahuzi was driving as fast as 70 mph on St. Louis Street as he approached National Avenue on Dec. 9, 2010.

His 2003 Nissan went airborne at railroad tracks, landed sideways and slid through two utility poles before hitting McCreary.

“Certainly, all three of those are very serious incidents,” Robinette said.

But he said he does not believe Saudi students are different from other international students who, in general, do well in Springfield.

“It is random,” he said. “It is not just associated with Saudi students.”

Robinette, when questioned, said he has seen no evidence Saudi male students have a lack of respect for women.

The number of Saudi college students has risen significantly in recent years at MSU and at colleges and universities across the United States. The growth in large part has been fueled by the King Abdullah Foreign Scholarship Program, administered by the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission.

The program started in 2005 and funds 12 to 18 months of language training in addition to undergraduate or graduate study, mostly in science or engineering-related fields.

Robinette said many Saudi students study business, economics and accounting — as well as English — at MSU.

Robinette did not know if the men charged with sexual assault were here on scholarship.

He was asked if the scholarship program in any way has changed the way Saudi students studying here are vetted.

He said no, and that background checks that would reveal a criminal past are conducted by the U.S. Consulate in Saudi Arabia.

“The thing I would tell you is that in the 13-plus years that I have worked with international students, I have never had an international student come and complain about the treatment they have received in the community,” Robinette said.

“Now, we are looking to the community to help us improve the reception of these international students,” he said.

http://www.news-leader.com/article/2...reign-students

9/11 was perpetrated by VISA overstays.....
Cab driver tells how he alerted Springfield police to alleged assault, kidnapping

Jun. 4, 2013 9:33 AM |




Cabbie describes suspicious fare: Springfield taxi driver Brian Newman tells us about the ride he gave to two men and a woman over the weekend. The woman later told police two men she didn't know sexually assaulted her.

Written by

Kathryn Wall
ZOOM

Ahmed Ayed A Alanazi, 27, left, and Rayan Mohammed A Alqabbaa, 21, are accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman they allegedly found at a bar.

Brian Newman knew something was wrong.

He’s been a cab driver for some time, and a bouncer at a club before that. He knows how drunken people act.

“Personally, my opinion is that she was drugged. I don’t see people get that far along without being drugged,” Newman said of a woman who ended up in his cab with two men early Saturday morning.

Those men, two Saudi Arabian students, are currently being held in Greene County Jail on $1 million bond each, accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting the woman, causing injury. Only two weeks earlier, police say, she had given birth through cesarean section.

Rayan Mohammed A Alqabbaa, 21, and Ahmed Ayed A Alanazi, 27, remain in Greene County jail.

Court documents say the attack was “likely alcohol or drug facilitated” and that the men had found the woman at a downtown Springfield nightclub.

Those documents also say that the cab driver was the one to tip off police that something was wrong.

Newman picked up the woman and two men downtown early Saturday morning and drove them to an apartment complex in the 700 block of East Elm Street.
On the way, he made small talk, like he always does. Where you guys from? What are your names?

But the men didn’t know the woman’s name. And she kept asking to go home, indicating it was near Nixa, before losing consciousness altogether.
They were going the opposite way.

Other things bothered Newman. He said the two men did not treat the woman very nicely.

“There’s a certain way couples, even good friends, would treat each other,” he said. But that wasn’t happening here.

He’s used to seeing people who have had a little too much. Their friends keep them upright, make sure their clothes stay on, that they keep everything covered.
Newman said the woman was modestly dressed, but the men didn’t bother to try and keep her covered.

“When they dragged her out of the car, safety was not part of their concern,” he said.

“My best description is they pulled her out of the car and threw her over their shoulders like a sack of potatoes.”

Then they went inside, and Newman sat outside in his cab trying to decide what to do.

He flagged down an officer and asked him to check on the woman.

An officer responded to the apartment complex and could hear a woman moaning from outside the building, the probable cause statement in the case said.
When the officers were allowed inside the apartment by a man identified as Alanazi, they described hearing a woman crying for help behind a locked bedroom door, court documents said.

After officers pounded on the door and shouted “police,” a man (later identified as Alqabbaa) opened it.

The officers wrote in court documents that they observed a woman inside, partially clothed, crying, vomiting and asking for help.

“She repeatedly stated, ‘take me home’ and ‘get me out of here,’” the probable cause statement said.

The victim, in and out of consciousness, told the officers she did not know the men.

She had given birth two weeks earlier and was hospitalized after the attack for severe bleeding, documents say.

She also had bruises on her arms, an abrasion on her elbow, a cut to her right hand and a bruise underneath her chin.

After being seen by medical personnel, the woman told police she and her fiance had gone downtown together, but that he had dropped her off at the door of a nightclub while he went to park the car. The documents don’t address where the fiance went afterward.

The victim said she was given two drinks by a bartender “on the house” but remembers little after that point.

“She said she remembered a group of men surrounding her. They grabbed her by the arms and were pulling her hair. She said she did not know them,” the probable cause statement said.

After the incident, the property manager of the apartment complex told police that the area was monitored by video surveillance.

The video, court documents say, shows Alanazi and Alqabbaa pulling the woman out of the cab — her body limp — and carrying her inside the apartment together.
Alanazi and Alqabbaa, the only two men in the apartment when officers arrived, are Saudi Arabian students here in Springfield for school. Missouri State University officials confirmed that they were part of the English Language Institute in the spring semester, but they have not signed up for future classes.

If either man were to bond out of jail, he would be required to hand over his passport.

Authorities asked for the high bond, documents say, because of the severity of the crime, the possibility they could flee and the “defendants’ tie to a foreign country.”

​http://www.news-leader.com/article/2...yssey=obinsite