New police squad makes rape breakthrough

Andy King

The first police squad dedicated to investigating adult sex crimes has made a break-through in a historic abduction and rape of a woman in Auckland.

A 33-year-old man was yesterday charged with snatching the woman from outside a city nightclub and raping her in the Parnell Rose Gardens five years ago.

The arrest was made by Auckland City's new Adult Sexual Assault Team [ASAT].

Auckland is the first police district to create a unit solely focused on investigating and managing adult sex crime files.

Detective Senior Sergeant Andy King, officer in charge of the team, said it had received 25 to 30 complaints for investigation since the beginning of July.

Auckland City police statistics for the year to December 2005 show the district recorded 196 sex attacks, with less than 50 per cent, or 95 cases, being resolved.

Files under investigation before July will remain at their respective police stations, unless new information, such as DNA matches, is received by the central team.

Mr King said: "Hopefully [the new system] is going to give sexual assault victims a very high priority in the way their files are investigated. They always have been [a priority] but it means we are a dedicated unit and deal with nothing else."

Mr King said new information led police to reassess the file in the past two weeks.

Police then believed the rape was premeditated and described it as particularly chilling.

The woman, aged in her early 20s, was grabbed from outside the Factory nightclub in O'Connell St around 11.45pm on August 25, 2001. She was allegedly driven to the gardens, taken down a walking track and raped.

Muddied and bruised, she made her way to a nearby hotel and a security guard rang police. Mr King said the woman was now living overseas but had been told of the arrest and was "extremely grateful".

The arrested man, a machinery operator from One Tree Hill, is due to appear in the Auckland District Court today.

The team would work closely with other agencies, including Auckland Sexual Abuse Help and Doctors For Sexual Abuse Care.

"[Adult sexual assault] can be a relatively difficult offence to investigate and to get through court. It's quite specialised and to have a specific squad dealing with it means they can be specially trained, which has already happened," Mr King said.