Police ScotlandA Syrian refugee who raped a stranger as she walked home from a night out has been jailed for eight years.
Mohand Mageed followed the 21-year-old student and started chatting to her before carrying out the sex attack in the close of a property near Glasgow city centre on February 9, 2025.
The traumatised victim told jurors: “I never deserved to be treated like that.”
Married Mageed – who had been granted leave to remain in the UK six months before his arrest – was sentenced at the High Court in Glasgow on Wednesday.
The 26-year-old had earlier been found guilty of rape following a trial in Edinburgh.
Judge Thomas Welsh KC told him: “The harm you have done to her is deep, long lasting and incalculable.
“Your risk of further sexual offending is assessed to be above average.
“Your conduct that night was predatory and dangerous.”
Mageed was put on the sex offenders list and banned from going near the victim – both for an indefinite period.
The young woman was attacked after deciding to walk home from a 21st birthday party.
CCTV captured Mageed sitting on steps of the city’s Buchanan Galleries before following the student.
She recalled: “He was asking me where I was going, where I had been.”
The woman briefly chatted to him, but described it as an “uncomfortable situation”.
She was also concerned having previously got a fright when a stranger was once aggressive to her.
In a bid to keep Mageed away, she stated she had a boyfriend.
But, as she was “trying to speed up” closer to her home, Mageed crossed the road and caught up.
Describing her ordeal, the young woman told jurors: “I remember him barging in behind me and being knocked to the ground.
“He burst through the door and he came at me very aggressively. I ended up on the floor.
“I was visibly panicked, upset and saying ‘no’. I was probably more shouting because I was scared.
“I was making it clear it was not something that I wanted to do.”
She also recalled how Mageed exposed himself before holding the victim down and raping her.
A neighbour heard what was happening and the attacker soon fled.
The victim told the trial how she remains badly affected, suffered “really bad anxiety” and could not go to university.
Mageed had been living at the city’s Alexander Thomson Hotel for the homeless at the time.
Graham Macdonald, defending, said the rapist maintains the stranger consented to sexual activity.
The court also heard Mageed’s wife remains in Syria and he has not seen her since 2023.
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