New York:
A Sikh cab driver, found guilty of raping and kidnapping a 29-year-old American woman in New York, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for the 2011 attack when he allegedly held her at knifepoint and assaulted her.
Gurmeet Singh, 42, had faced a 25-year sentence and was ordered to serve 20 years behind bars at a hearing yesterday.
The woman had testified at the trial that she had boarded Singh's cab after a late night party in May 2011.
She said she had fallen asleep in the car but woke up to find Singh on top of her, threatening her with a knife. "Bound, gagged, blindfolded with a knife to her throat," prosecutor Linda Weinman had said in her closing argument, "(She) woke up to her worst nightmare."
The woman suffered cuts and a busted lip and her cell phone and $20 dollars were missing. "I thought I'm going to get killed," the victim had recounted at the trial.
She described feeling still traumatised by the incident. "You may have bound, gagged and blindfolded me, but I'm the one who's speaking now," she wrote in a letter read in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
"You will be serving time," a report in the New York Daily News quoted her as saying.
"I was terrified I won't make it out alive," she wrote in her statement, which Weinman read aloud to Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Miriam Cyulnik. "I still have nightmares," the statement said.
She said flashbacks of the assault forced her to leave the city a year later and she still struggles with the emotional toll of the disturbing ordeal.
"After three years, it's finally over and I can start healing," she wrote.
At trial, she had described how a "foul-smelling" Singh tied her hands with a scarf, stuffed her mouth with paper towels and blindfolded her eyes with a sleep mask. He then raped her. But Singh denied raping the woman as he took the stand in his trial.
He said the woman refused to leave his cab and stayed in the taxi as he drove back to return it.
The woman then got into his private SUV and "seduced him into having sex", he said adding that she demanded money from him. "I didn't force her to do anything," he said.
His sister called the father-of-two from Jamaica, Queens "a gentle, generous, compassionate human being" and members of his Sikh community pleaded for leniency and offered restitution to the woman.
Singh's testimony allowed Weinman to grill him about an incident in September 2011 that ultimately led to his capture.
In that case, Singh was accused of molesting a drunk woman in Harlem but he told detectives that the woman voluntarily had sex with him.
The September 2011 case revived the present case, which had dead-ended after an initial investigation.