Mohamad Sh. (38) has been sentenced to six and a half years in prison for rape and unlawful deprivation of liberty. The victim managed to save herself by secretly sending a message for help.
Mohamad Sh., a Pakistani national who claims he never finished school and cannot read or write, has been in the European Union since 2004, spending most of that time in prisons. In Croatia, he received his second conviction for rape. Although he was supposed to be deported after serving his first sentence, he applied for asylum again and remained in the country long enough to commit an even more serious crime.
The County Court in Zagreb has sentenced him, in a non-final verdict, to a unified prison term of six and a half years for raping a Nepali national on June 2 last year in a house near Zagreb, where he also held her captive for nearly 20 hours. The sentence combines six years for rape and eight months for unlawful deprivation of liberty, with 14 months already spent in pre-trial detention to be credited. This 38-year-old construction worker had already been convicted in 2021 to four years in prison for the same type of offense.
According to the indictment, Mohamad Sh. contacted the victim and took her to a job interview for a waitress position. After returning to the house where they were staying illegally, the victim told him she wanted to find other accommodation. He then locked the door, hid the key, and prevented her from moving freely. What followed was repeated rape, during which he ignored her pleas, tears, and screams, telling her that no one would hear her anyway.
During the abuse, he intimidated her by claiming he had killed someone in his homeland, using this to break her resistance. At one point, the victim managed to get hold of her mobile phone and send a message for help. She contacted the president of a non-profit organization advocating for foreign workers in Croatia, as well as a Nepali influencer. A witness testified in court that he received her WhatsApp message with her location, after which he contacted a friend and the police.
"I received a message on WhatsApp from the victim that a male person, who had promised to find her a job, had detained her, kidnapped her, locked her in a room, and was abusing her. She also sent me her location, so I contacted a friend and the police," the witness described for Jutarnji list.
The police quickly arrived at the scene, and Mohamad Sh. attempted to flee by jumping out of a window from a height of four meters. He was soon arrested, and several used condoms were found in the house. The defendant denied guilt in court, claiming he was reported out of revenge by people who disapproved of his mediation in the victim's employment, and that he fled because he did not have his identification documents on him.
"When the police arrived, they said they came because they had information that someone had kidnapped someone. And the report did not come from the victim, but from people who were bothered by my mediating in her employment," Mohamad Sh. claimed for Jutarnji list.
The judicial panel did not believe his defense, deeming it implausible and inconsistent. During the proceedings, it was also revealed that he had deleted messages from the victim's phone that showed her location, making it difficult for her to send the distress call.
An aggravating circumstance for the court was his prior conviction for the same offense, along with the high intensity of force used and the degree of criminal intent. For the rape committed in July 2020 at the Porin Foreigners Reception Center, the County Court in Velika Gorica sentenced him to four years in prison. He served that sentence in Glina Prison and was released on July 31, 2024.
However, his freedom lasted only a few minutes. Upon leaving prison, he was met by Ministry of Interior officers and placed in the Ježevo Detention and Deportation Center, where a decision was made to deport him from the country. Mohamad Sh. preempted this by filing a new asylum application. Although his application was rejected, and his appeal was also dismissed by the competent court, he could stay in Ježevo for a maximum of six months pending a final decision. After that, he ended up back at the Porin Reception Center.
It was this slowness of the system in awaiting the finality of the deportation order that led to the Pakistani man raping again. The case sparked strong public reactions, and Nikola Grmoja from Most publicly asked why a Pakistani who had already been convicted of rape was not deported, but instead allowed to remain in the country. If the High Criminal Court upholds the six-and-a-half-year sentence, he should remain behind bars until the end of 2031.
